Kategoria BISAC: Science >> Physics - Gravity

This volume is composed of extensive and detailed notes from the lectures given at the 40th Karpacz Winter School. This school focussed on quantum gravity phenomenology with emphasis on its relation to observational astrophysics and cosmology. These notes have been carefully edited with the aim to give advanced students and young researchers a balanced and accessible introduction to a rather heavily mathematical subject.

• Are we living in the "golden age" of cosmology?
• Are we close to understanding the nature of the unknown ingredients of the currently most accepted cosmological model and the physics of the early Universe? Or are we instead approaching a paradigm shift?
• What is dark matter and does it exist? How is it distributed around galaxies and clusters?
• Is the scientific community open to alternative ideas that may prompt a new scientific revolution - as the Copernican revolution did in Galileo's time?
• Do other types of supernovae exist that can be of...

Special relativity is the basis of many fields in modern physics: particle physics, quantum field theory, high-energy astrophysics, etc. This theory is presented here by adopting a four-dimensional point of view from the start. An outstanding feature of the book is that it doesn't restrict itself to inertial frames but considers accelerated and rotating observers. It is thus possible to treat physical effects such as the Thomas precession or the Sagnac effect in a simple yet precise manner. In the final chapters, more advanced topics like tensorial fields in spacetime, exterior calculus...

This book reviews the phenomenology displayed by relativistic jets as well as the most recent theoretical efforts to understand the physical mechanisms at their origin. Relativistic jets have been observed and studied in Active Galactic Nuclei (AGN) for about half a century and are believed to be fueled by accretion onto a supermassive black hole at the center of the host galaxy. Since the first discovery of relativistic jets associated with so-called "micro-quasars" much more recently, it has seemed clear that much of the physics governing the relativistic outflows in stellar X-ray...