Astrophysics

The unrenormalised energy momentum tensor is both huge and fluctuating from point to point. Taking this seriously we (Qingdi Wang, Zhen Zhu, and myself) argue that the slow exponential expansion of the universe (on time scales of 10^10 years) comes from a very weak parametric resonance induced by the fluctuating energy mementum tensor on the rapidly fluctuating scale factor (on time scales much shorter than the Planck scale). We see only the slow exponential growth because we avarage over the scale factor squared.

In 1977, Blandford and Znajek  discovered a process by which a spinning 

black hole can transfer rotational energy to a force-free plasma, offering a possible mechanism for energy and jet emissions from quasars and other astrophysical sources.  This Blandford-Znajek (BZ) mechanism is a Penrose process, which exploits the presence of an ergosphere supporting negative energy states, and it involves currents of electrical charge sourcing the toroidal  magnetic field component of the emitted Poynting flux.  

In this talk, I will discuss a version of the BZ process requiring only vacuum electromagnetic fields outside the black hole.  The setting is somewhat artificial, since it assumes the black hole is cylindrical rather than spheroidal, or that the black hole lives in 2 spatial dimensions, but it is nevertheless of theoretical interest.  The radiation power and horizon regularity relations are identical to those of the BZ mechanism with plasma, and the solution can be given in simple, closed form for a wide class of metrics, so it helps to illuminate the nature of the original mechanism.  For asymptotically Anti-de Sitter black holes it presumably has an interesting dual CFT description, but we haven't quite yet figured out  what that is.

We present an analytic, perturbative solution that describes dynamical black holes in slow-roll inflation with a general potential. It is shown that the spacetime evolves quasi-statically through a sequence of quasi-Schwarzchild-deSitter metrics with time dependent cosmological constant and mass parameters, such that the cosmological constant is instanteously equal to the value of the scalar potential.  The areas of the black hole and cosmological horizons each increase in time as the effective cosmological constant decreases, and the the factional area increase is proportional to the fractional change of the cosmological constant, times a geometrical factor. For black holes ranging in size from much smaller than to comparable to the cosmological horizon, the pre-factor varies from very small to order one. The change in the horizon areas happens in such a way that the first law of thermodynamics is obeyed between successive time steps.