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In order to show how formal analogies between different physical systems play an important conceptual work in physics, this paper analyzes the evolution of Einstein's thoughts on the structure of radiation from the point of view of the formal analogies he used as 'lenses' to 'see' through the 'black box' of Planck's blackbody radiation law. A comparison is also made with his 1925 paper on the quantum gas where he used the same formal methods. Changes of formal points of view are most of the time taken for granted or passed over in silence in studies on the mathematization of physics as if they had no special significance. Revisiting Einstein's classic papers on the nature of light and matter from the angle of the various theoretical tools he used, namely entropy and energy fluctuation calculations, helps explain why he was in a unique position to make visible the particle structure of radiation and the dual (particle and wave) nature of light and matter. Finally, this case study calls attention to the more general question of the surprising creative power of formal analogies and their frequent use in theoretical physics. This aspect of intellectual creation can be useful in the teaching of physics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We review the exact solutions in modified gravity. It is one of the main problems of mathematical physics for the gravity theory. One can obtain an exact solution if the field equations reduce to a system of ordinary differential equations. In this paper we consider a number of exact solutions obtained by the method of separation of variables. Some applications to Cosmology and BH entropy are briefly mentioned. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We refute a physical model, recently proposed by Gunn, Allison and Abbott (GAA) [], to utilize electromagnetic waves for eavesdropping on the Kirchhoff-law-Johnson-noise (KLJN) secure key distribution. Their model, and its theoretical underpinnings, is found to be fundamentally flawed because their assumption of electromagnetic waves violates not only the wave equation but also the second law of thermodynamics, the principle of detailed balance, Boltzmann's energy equipartition theorem, and Planck's formula by implying infinitely strong blackbody radiation. We deduce the correct mathematical model of the GAA scheme, which is based on impedances at the quasi-static limit. Mathematical analysis and simulation results confirm our approach and prove that GAA's experimental interpretation is incorrect too. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Hawking radiation, despite being known to theoretical physics for nearly 40 years, remains elusive and undetected. It also suffers, in its original context of gravitational black holes, from practical and conceptual difficulties. Of particular note is the trans-Planckian problem, which is concerned with the apparent origin of the radiation in absurdly high frequencies. In order to gain better theoretical understanding and, it is hoped, experimental verification of Hawking radiation, much study is being devoted to laboratory systems which use moving media to model the spacetime geometry of black holes, and which, by analogy, are also thought to emit Hawking radiation. These analogue systems typically exhibit dispersion, which regularizes the wave behaviour at the horizon at the cost of a more complicated theoretical framework. This tutorial serves as an introduction to Hawking radiation and its analogues, developing the moving medium analogy for black holes and demonstrating how dispersion can be incorporated into this generalized framework. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Previous papers dealt with the quantization of the Lemaitre-Tolman-Bondi (LTB) model for vanishing cosmological constant L. Here we extend the analysis to the case L > 0. Our main goal is to present solutions of the Wheeler-DeWitt equation, to give their interpretation and to derive Hawking radiation from them. We restrict ourselves to a discussion of those points that are different from the L = 0-case. These are mainly to do with the occurrence of two horizons. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Recently, Nation et al. confirmed that fluxes of Hawking radiation energy and entropy from a black hole can be regarded as a one-dimensional (1D) non-equilibrium Landauer transport process. Their work can be extended to background space-times with gauge potential. The result shows that the energy flux of charged particles, which is shown to be equal to the energy-momentum tensor flux, contains not only the contribution of thermal flux but also that of particle flux. It is found that the charge can also be transported by the 1D quantum channel. Moreover, the entropy production rate is also investigated, which is shown to be larger than the case without chemical potential. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We first consider consistently third-quantize modified gravity. We then analyze certain aspects of virtual black holes in this third-quantized modified gravity. We see how a statistical mechanical origin for the Bekenstein-Hawking entropy naturally arises in this model. Furthermore, the area and hence the entropy of a real macroscopic black hole is quantized in this model. Virtual black holes cause a loss of quantum coherence, which gives an intrinsic entropy to all physical systems that can be used to define a direction of time and hence provide a solution to the problem of time. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Hawking's radiation effect of Klein-Gordon scalar field, Dirac particles and Maxwell's electromagnetic field in the non-stationary rotating de Sitter cosmological space-time is investigated by using a method of generalized tortoise co-ordinates transformation. The locations and the temperatures of the cosmological horizons of the non-stationary rotating de Sitter model are derived. It is found that the locations and the temperatures of the rotating cosmological model depend not only on the time but also on the angle. The stress-energy regularization techniques are applied to the two dimensional analog of the de Sitter metrics and the calculated stress-energy tensor contains the thermal radiation effect. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Terahertz imaging makes it possible to acquire images of objects concealed underneath clothing by measuring the radiometric temperatures of different objects on a human subject. The goal of this work is to automatically detect and segment concealed objects in broadband 0.1-1 THz images. Due to the inherent physical properties of passive terahertz imaging and associated hardware, images have poor contrast and low signal to noise ratio. Standard segmentation algorithms are unable to segment or detect concealed objects. Our approach relies on two stages. First, we remove the noise from the image using the anisotropic diffusion algorithm. We then detect the boundaries of the concealed objects. We use a mixture of Gaussian densities to model the distribution of the temperature inside the image. We then evolve curves along the isocontours of the image to identify the concealed objects. We have compared our approach with two state-of-the-art segmentation methods. Both methods fail to identify the concealed objects, while our method accurately detected the objects. In addition, our approach was more accurate than a state-of-the-art supervised image segmentation algorithm that required that the concealed objects be already identified. Our approach is completely unsupervised and could work in real-time on dedicated hardware. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We have carried out three-dimensional hydrodynamical modeling of the formation of an accretion disk around a compact object due to radiative wind of a massive donor in a close binary system. The massive X-ray binary Cen X-3, which has a precessing accretion disk and may possess relativistic jets, is considered as an example. The computations show that, when the action of the central compact object on the formation of the wind is taken into account, the radiative wind forms an accretion disk with a radius of 0.16 (in units of the orbital separation), which accretes at a rate close to 1 × 10−8 M ⊙/yr. In this model, the disk is spherically symmetrical and geometrically thick, with a tunnel going from the accretor to the upper layers of the disk along the accretor’s rotational axis at the disk center. The number density of the gas in the tunnel is five orders of magnitude lower than in the disk. The wind-disk interaction at the outer boundary of the disk produces a strong shock (wind-disk shock) directed toward the donor. The black-body emission of the disk and tunnel is nonstationary, and resembles the outbursts observed in Cen X-3. An analysis of the location of the region of nonstationary emission suggests that the outbursts occur in the wind-disk shock. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]