David vs. Goliath: Using black hole mass scales to probe the largest accelerators in the universe

by Sera Markoff (Univ. of Amsterdam)

Wednesday 9 Feb 2011, 14:00 → 15:00 Europe/Brussels

Large seminar room : 1G-003 (IIHE(ULB-VUB))

Accreting black holes are known to launch powerful jets, that are thought to be capable of accelerating even heavy particles up to the ultra-high energies detected by, e.g., the Auger experiment (>10^19 eV). However even after decades of study, we still do not understand many basic points about how these jets are formed and launched, nor the exact mechanisms leading to particle acceleration. The recent discovery of a relation linking accretion-driven radiative attributes to black hole mass, called the Fundamental Plane (FP) of black hole accretion, may be able to shed new light on these questions. After a brief introduction to astrophysical black holes, I will present the FP phenomenology and its implications for the study of black hole jets. In particular, I will focus on how we can exploit the FP relation to study particle acceleration in the jets, and best constrain high-energy photon and particle fluxes by taking into account the entire broadband spectrum.