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At least 253 records · Page 14
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DOE OSTI2024

Electromagnetic entrapment in gravity

Abstract We derive specific properties of electromagnetism when gravitational effects are not negligible and analyze their impact on new physics at the horizons of black holes. We show that a neutral configuration of charges in a region of high redshift, characterized by a largeg tt , produces a highly localized electromagnetic field that vanishes just beyond that region. This phenomenon implies the existence of extensive families of spacetime structures generated by electromagnetic degrees of freedom that are as compact as black holes. We construct neutral bound states of extremal black holes in four dimensions and in five dimensions, where one direction is compact. These geometries are indistinguishable from a neutral black hole, referred to asdistorted Schwarzschild, except in an infinitesimal region near its horizon where the entrapped electromagnetic structures start to manifest. The five-dimensional solutions satisfy various criteria for describing black hole microstructure: they increase in size with the Newton constant, are as compact as the Schwarzschild black hole, and have an entropy that scales likeM 2 .

Physics↗
DOE OSTI2021

Universal entropy and hawking radiation of near-extremal AdS4 black holes

We compute the Bekenstein-Hawking entropy of near-extremal asymptotically AdS 4 electrically charged rotating black holes using three different methods: (i) from the gravity solution, (ii) from the near-horizon Kerr/CFT correspondence and (iii) from the boundary conformal field theory. The results from these three different approaches match exactly, giving us a unique and universal expression for the entropy and the microstate counting of near-extremal AdS black holes via the AdS/CFT correspondence. In the second method, we extend the Kerr/CFT correspondence to the near-extremal case to compute the left and right central charges. We also use hidden conformal symmetry of the near-horizon geometry to compute the Frolov-Thorne temperatures. From the results of the near-extremal AdS 4 black hole entropy, we provide a microscopic foundation for Hawking radiation.

72 PHYSICS OF ELEMENTARY PARTICLES AND FIELDS↗
DOE OSTI2023

Scattering in black hole backgrounds and higher-spin amplitudes. Part II

We continue to investigate correspondences between, on the one hand, scattering amplitudes for massive higher-spin particles and gravitons in appropriate quantum-to-classical limits, and on the other hand, classical gravitational interactions of spinning black holes according to general relativity. We first construct an ansatz for a gravitational Compton amplitude, at tree level, constrained only by locality, crossing symmetry, unitarity and consistency with the linearized-Kerr 3-point amplitude, to all orders in the black hole’s spin. We then explore the extent to which a unique classical Compton amplitude can be identified by comparing with the results of the classical process of scattering long-wavelength gravitational waves off an exact Kerr black hole, determined by appropriate solutions of the Teukolsky equation. Up to fourth order in spin, we find complete agreement with a previously conjectured exponential form of the tree-level Compton amplitude. At higher orders, we extract tree-level contributions from the Teukolsky amplitude by an analytic continuation from a physical (a/GM < 1) to a particle-like (a/GM > 1) regime. Up to the sixth order in spin, we identify a unique conservative part of the amplitude which is insensitive both to the choice of boundary conditions at the black hole horizon and to branch choices in the analytic continuation. The remainder of the amplitude is determined modulo an overall sign from a branch choice, with the sign flipping under exchanging purely ingoing and purely outgoing boundary conditions at the horizon. Along the way, we make contact with novel applications of massive spinor-helicity variables pertaining to their relation to EFT operators and (spinning) partial amplitudes.

79 ASTRONOMY AND ASTROPHYSICS↗
DOE OSTI2020

Thermalization in the D1D5 CFT

It is generally agreed that black hole formation in gravity corresponds to thermalization in the dual CFT. It is sometimes argued that if the CFT evolution shows evidence of large redshift in gravity, then we have seen black hole formation in the CFT. We argue that this is not the case: a clock falling towards the horizon increases its redshift but remains intact as a clock; thus it is not `thermalized'. Instead, thermalization should correspond to a new phase after the phase of large redshift, where the infalling object turns into fuzzballs on reaching within planck distance of the horizon. We compute simple examples of the scattering vertex in the D1D5 CFT which, after many iterations, would lead to thermalization. An initial state made of two left-moving and two right-moving excitations corresponds, in gravity, to two gravitons heading towards each other. The thermalization vertex in the CFT breaks these excitations into multiple excitations on the left and right sides; we compute the amplitudes for several of these processes. We find secular terms that grow as $t^2$ instead of oscillating with $t$; we conjecture that this may be a feature of processes leading to thermalization.

72 PHYSICS OF ELEMENTARY PARTICLES AND FIELDS↗
DOE OSTI2020

Toward an effective CFT 2 from $ \mathcal{N} $ = 4 super Yang-Mills and aspects of Hawking radiation

Using $ \mathcal{N} $ = 4 supersymmetric Yang-Mills theory we recover important aspects of the near-extremal thermodynamics of AdS 5 black holes including both the outer and the inner horizons with their corresponding entropy and energy. This $ \mathcal{N} $ = 4 supersymmetric Yang-Mills theory approach to black hole thermodynamics leads to an effective CFT 2 interpretation similar to the work by Callan and Maldacena. We corroborate this effective CFT 2 by implementing a particular near-horizon limit that geometrizes the Virasoro algebras as asymptotic symmetries. Using the effective CFT 2 picture, we discuss aspects of the Hawking radiation rate for a region of the near-extremal AdS 5 black hole quantum evolution.

71 CLASSICAL AND QUANTUM MECHANICS, GENERAL PHYSIC↗
DOE OSTI2020

Holographic flows from CFT to the Kasner universe

The Schwarzschild singularity is known to be classically unstable. We demonstrate a simple holographic consequence of this fact, focusing on a perturbation that is uniform in boundary space and time. Deformation of the thermal state of the dual CFT by a relevant operator triggers a nonzero temperature holographic renormalization group flow in the bulk. This flow continues smoothly through the horizon and, at late interior time, deforms the Schwarzschild singularity into a more general Kasner universe. We show that the deformed near-singularity, trans-horizon Kasner exponents determine specific non-analytic corrections to the thermal correlation functions of heavy operators in the dual CFT, in the analytically continued ‘near-singularity’ regime.

79 ASTRONOMY AND ASTROPHYSICS↗
DOE OSTI2021

Six-point functions and collisions in the black hole interior

In the eternal AdS black hole geometry, we consider two signals sent from the boundaries into the black hole interior shared between the two asymptotic regions. We compute three different out-of-time-order six-point functions to quantify various properties of the collision of these signals behind the horizons: (i) We diagnose the strength of the collision by probing the two-signal state on a late time slice with boundary operators. (ii) We quantify two-sided operator growth, which provides a dual description of the signals meeting in the black hole interior, in terms of the quantum butterfly effect and quantum circuits. (iii) We consider an explicit coupling between the left and right CFTs to make the wormhole traversable and extract information about the collision product from behind the horizon. At a technical level, our results rely on the method of eikonal resummation to obtain the relevant gravitational contributions to Lorentzian six-point functions at all orders in the GN-expansion. We observe that such correlation functions display an intriguing factorization property. We corroborate these results with geodesic computations of six-point functions in two- and three-dimensional gravity.

2D Gravity↗
DOE OSTI2025

Quantum area fluctuations from gravitational phase space

We study the gravitational phase space associated to a stretched horizon within a finite-sized causal diamond in (d + 2)-dimensional spacetimes. By imposing the Raychaudhuri equation, we obtain its constrained symplectic form using the covariant phase space formalism and derive the relevant quantum commutators by inverting the symplectic form and quantizing. Finally, we compute the area fluctuations of the causal diamond by taking a Carrollian limit of the stretched horizon in pure Minkowski spacetime, and derive the relationship $\left\langle {\left(\Delta A\right)}^2\right\rangle \ge \frac{2\pi G}{d}\left\langle A\right\rangle$, showing that the variance of the area fluctuations is proportional to the area itself.

classical theories of gravity↗
DOE OSTI2021

Shocks and information exchange in de Sitter space

We discuss some implications of recent progress in understanding the black hole information paradox for complementarity in de Sitter space. Extending recent work by two of the authors, we describe a bulk procedure that allows information expelled through the cosmological horizon to be received by an antipodal observer. Generically, this information transfer takes a scrambling time t=H- 1 (S ds ). We emphasize that this procedure relies crucially on selection of the Bunch-Davies vacuum state, interpreted as the thermofield double state that maximally entangles two antipodal static patches. The procedure also requires the presence of an (entangled) energy reservoir, created by the collection of Hawking modes from the cosmological horizon. We show how this procedure avoids a cloning paradox and comment on its implications.

71 CLASSICAL AND QUANTUM MECHANICS, GENERAL PHYSIC↗
DOE OSTI2022

Resolving black-hole microstructure with new momentum carriers

All known horizonless black-hole microstate geometries correspond to brane sources that acquire a finite size, and hence break the spherical symmetry of the black hole. We construct, for the first time, solutions with zero horizon area that have the same charges as a three-charge F1-NS5-P Type-IIA black hole and preserve this spherical symmetry. The momentum of these solutions is carried by longitudinal D0-D4 density fluctuations inside the NS5-branes. We argue that these solutions should be interpreted as the long-throat limit of a family of smooth, horizonless microstate geometries, called superstrata, where such geometries degenerate. The existence of these geometries indicates that a finite-size horizon does not appear even in the singular corners of the moduli space of three-charge microstate geometries.

79 ASTRONOMY AND ASTROPHYSICS↗
DOE OSTI2020

Gravitational Cardy limit and AdS black hole entropy

We explore the gravitational implementation of the field theory Cardy-like limit recently used in the successful microstate countings of AdS black hole entropy in various dimensions. On the field theory side, the Cardy-like limit focuses on a particular scaling of conserved electric charges and angular momenta and we first translate this scaling to the gravitational side by a limiting procedure on the black hole parameters. We note that the scaling naturally accompanies a near-horizon region for which these black hole solutions are greatly simplified. Applying the Kerr/CFT correspondence to the near-horizon region, we precisely reproduce the Bekenstein-Hawking entropy of asymptotically AdS 4,5,6,7 BPS black holes. Our results explicitly provide a microscopic and universal low energy description for AdS black holes across various dimensions.

72 PHYSICS OF ELEMENTARY PARTICLES AND FIELDS↗
DOE OSTI2021

Bulk entropy is crucial to validate the second law of the extended black hole thermodynamics

The extended black hole thermodynamics in which the cosmological constant plays the role of pressure significantly enriches the phase structure of the theory. In order to understand the extended black hole thermodynamics more precisely, we let the value of the cosmological constant vary dynamically via tunneling from one vacuum to another in a black hole induced vacuum decay. In this process, entropy of the matter/energy released by a black hole is crucial to validate the second law of thermodynamics. In other words, without taking this bulk entropy into account, entropy associated with the black hole and cosmological horizons may not always increase. Since the bulk entropy is not represented by the black hole and the cosmological horizons, this result calls for a more careful interpretation of the holographic principle in which environmental effects are taken into account.

71 CLASSICAL AND QUANTUM MECHANICS, GENERAL PHYSIC↗
DOE OSTI2024

Mixed gauge-global symmetries, elliptic modes, and black hole thermodynamics in Hořava-Lifshitz gravity

In Hořava-Lifshitz gravity, a putative consistent theory of quantum gravity for which there is evidence for both black hole thermodynamics and a holographic construction, spacetime is endowed with a preferred dynamical spacelike foliation. The theory has a leaf reparameterization symmetry that is neither global nor local gauge, hyperbolic and elliptic equations of motion, a lack of splittability, and universal horizon black hole solutions. The reparameterization symmetry is “mixed”: it is a local symmetry in one coordinate yet global on each leaf. More broadly it is an example of both unfree and projectable gauge symmetries. The mixed symmetry and associated charge has not yet been accounted for in calculations of universal horizon thermodynamics in Hořava-Lifshitz gravity. This has led to problems, in particular the failure of the first law in a class of asymptotically AdS solutions where the normal to the leaves of the foliation is not aligned with the time translation Killing vector at infinity. We show how the dynamics of the charge corresponding to this symmetry coupled with the other features above resolves this issue. We then briefly comment how this mixed symmetry, the corresponding charge, and the elliptic equations of motion also conspire to evade recent holographic arguments for only local gauge fields in consistent theories of quantum gravity due to the lack of splittability of the elliptic equation and associated mode.

Global Symmetries↗
DOE OSTI2019

Hydrogeomorphic controls on soil carbon composition in two classes of subalpine wetlands

Wetlands play a vital role in terrestrial carbon (C) sequestration, but the sensitivity of their C stocks to disturbance remains uncertain, requiring enhanced understanding of the processes that govern C storage and removal. The unique conditions in wetlands from different hydrogeomorphic (HGM) classes likely regulate the cycling, storage and vulnerabilities of wetland soil C stocks. To determine how differences in hydrogeomorphic setting influence soil organic carbon (SOC) processing, in this study we compared C content and composition between depressional and slope wetlands located in the Colorado Rocky Mountains. Isolated depressional wetlands were characterized by seasonally declining water tables, slow discharge, high clay content, and thick organic horizons. Slope wetlands received perennial groundwater inputs and had coarser soil textures and thinner organic horizons. Seasonal snowmelt inputs coupled with low hydrologic discharge and higher clay content in depressional wetlands were predicted to sustain anoxic conditions, leading to high SOC content and chemically reduced C compounds. Depressional wetland soils had higher SOC content at depth and higher porewater DOC concentrations compared to slope wetland soils. Solid-state 13 C nuclear magnetic resonance spectroscopy demonstrated that aliphatic compounds were the dominant SOC component in depressional wetlands compared to aromatic C forms in the slope wetlands. The higher prevalence of aliphatic carbon in depressional wetland soils suggests that stored SOC is protected by anaerobic conditions to a greater extent than in the slope wetlands, and that this SOC may be more vulnerable to drying and oxic conditions associated with wetland drainage and climate change.

13C NMR↗
DOE OSTI2022

Impacts of climate and disturbance on nutrient fluxes and stoichiometry in mixed-conifer forests

Elucidating climatic impacts on stream nutrient export and stoichiometry will improve the understanding of forest carbon (C) storage in a warmer world. We constructed C, nitrogen (N), and phosphorus (P) budgets in four watersheds within a rain-snow transition site and another four within a higher-elevation, snow-dominated site, in California’s mixed-conifer zone. We used these two sites in a space-for-time substitution to assess the potential effects of warming on nutrient cycles in currently snow-dominated areas that will become more rain-dominated. During a non-drought period (water year (WY) 2004 – 2011), mean annual stream exports of C and N in particulate forms at the transition site were double that at the snow-dominated site, suggesting that sediment-associated nutrient losses may increase with warming. The transition site had 12% lower N but double the P content in mineral horizons, lower N:P mass ratios in organic horizons, and lower stream export of dissolved inorganic N than the snow-dominated site. Furthermore, these differences suggest that montane forests may receive lower supply of N relative to P with warming. In addition, given strong interests in forest thinning to increase drought resiliency, we examined changes in stream nutrient export after thinning and during a major drought period (WY 2013 – 2015). Stream exports of C, N, and P were similar between unthinned and thinned watersheds during drought, suggesting negligible thinning impacts on stream nutrient export during excessively dry periods. Taken together, our results suggest that as the climate warms, California’s montane forests may lose more nutrients through erosion and receive less N input than P.

54 ENVIRONMENTAL SCIENCES↗
DOE OSTI2025

Fundamental physics opportunities with future ground-based mm/sub-mm VLBI arrays

The Event Horizon Telescope (EHT) Collaboration recently published the first images of the supermassive black holes in the cores of the Messier 87 and Milky Way galaxies. These observations have provided a new means to study supermassive black holes and probe physical processes occurring in the strong-field regime. We review the prospects of future observations and theoretical studies of supermassive black hole systems. Current ground-based very-long-baseline interferometry (VLBI) arrays like the EHT and proposed future extensions like the next-generation Event Horizon Telescope will greatly enhance the capabilities of black-hole imaging interferometry. These enhancements will open up several previously inaccessible avenues of investigation, thereby providing important new insights into the properties of supermassive black holes and their environments. This review describes the current state of knowledge for five key science cases, summarising the unique challenges and opportunities for fundamental physics investigations that future mm/sub-mm VLBI developments will enable.

72 PHYSICS OF ELEMENTARY PARTICLES AND FIELDS↗
DOE OSTI2020

Building thermal load prediction through shallow machine learning and deep learning

Building thermal load prediction informs the optimization of cooling plant and thermal energy storage. Physics-based prediction models of building thermal load are constrained by the model and input complexity. In this study, we developed 12 data-driven models (7 shallow learning, 2 deep learning, and 3 heuristic methods) to predict building thermal load and compared shallow machine learning and deep learning. The 12 prediction models were compared with the measured cooling demand. It was found XGBoost (Extreme Gradient Boost) and LSTM (Long Short Term Memory) provided the most accurate load prediction in the shallow and deep learning category, and both outperformed the best baseline model, which uses the previous day's data for prediction. Then, we discussed how the prediction horizon and input uncertainty would influence the load prediction accuracy. Major conclusions are twofold: first, LSTM performs well in short-term prediction (1 h ahead) but not in long term prediction (24 h ahead), because the sequential information becomes less relevant and accordingly not so useful when the prediction horizon is long. Second, the presence of weather forecast uncertainty deteriorates XGBoost's accuracy and favors LSTM, because the sequential information makes the model more robust to input uncertainty. Training the model with the uncertain rather than accurate weather data could enhance the model's robustness. Finally, our findings have two implications for practice. First, LSTM is recommended for short-term load prediction given that weather forecast uncertainty is unavoidable. Second, XGBoost is recommended for long term prediction, and the model should be trained with the presence of input uncertainty.

32 ENERGY CONSERVATION, CONSUMPTION, AND UTILIZATI↗
DOE OSTI2022

Dispatch optimization of a concentrating solar power system under uncertain solar irradiance and energy prices

The integration of thermal energy storage into a concentrating solar power system allows for mitigating some of the risk associated with uncertain solar irradiance and uncertain energy prices. We solve a 48 h dispatch optimization model with continually updated conditional point forecasts of both direct normal irradiance (DNI) and electricity prices with a rolling-horizon scheme at hourly resolution over the course of a year. Joint, conditional forecasts for DNI and prices are formed using an autoregressive moving-average time series model with exogenous weather predictors. We guide dispatch using a mixed-integer programming model, but in order to evaluate performance we use the System Advisor Model (SAM) of the National Renewable Energy Laboratory. SAM is a techno-economic simulation model that accounts for plant thermodynamics with higher fidelity. Our conditional DNI forecasts improve annual revenue by 4%–12% over using historical forecasts based on data from previous years. Conditional price forecasts improve annual revenue by 6%–19% in the real-time market over analogous historical forecasts. Updating these forecasts every six hours, rather than every 24 h, further improves annual revenue by 5%–6%. Here, we also investigate a method that values terminal inventory in our dispatch optimization model, again when used in a rolling-horizon scheme.

14 SOLAR ENERGY↗