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Abstract Active galactic nuclei in general, and the supermassive black hole in M87 in particular, show bright and rapid gamma-ray flares up to energies of 100 GeV and above. For M87, the flares show multiwavelength components, and the variability timescale is comparable to the dynamical time of the event horizon, suggesting that the emission may come from a compact region near the nucleus. However, the emission mechanism for these flares is not well understood. Recent high-resolution general-relativistic magnetohydrodynamic simulations show the occurrence of episodic magnetic reconnection events that can power flares near the black hole event horizon. In this work, we analyze the radiative properties of the reconnecting current layer under the extreme plasma conditions applicable to the black hole in M87 from first principles. We show that abundant pair production is expected in the vicinity of the reconnection layer, to the extent that the produced secondary pair plasma dominates the reconnection dynamics. Using analytic estimates backed by two-dimensional particle-in-cell simulations, we demonstrate that in the presence of strong synchrotron cooling, reconnection can produce a hard power-law distribution of pair plasma imprinted in the outgoing synchrotron (up to a few tens of MeV) and the inverse-Compton signal (up to TeV). We produce synthetic radiation spectra from our simulations, which can be directly compared with the results of future multiwavelength observations of M87* flares. 

Inclusive electron scattering cross sections off a hydrogen target at a beam energy of 10.6 GeV have been measured with data collected from the CLAS12 spectrometer at Jefferson Laboratory. These first absolute cross sections from CLAS12 cover a wide kinematic area in invariant mass $W$of the final state hadrons from the pion threshold up to 2.5 GeV for each bin in virtual photon four-momentum transfer squared $Q^2$from 2.55 to $10.4{\mathrm{GeV}}^2$owing to the large scattering angle acceptance of the CLAS12 detector. Comparison of the cross sections with the resonant contributions computed from the CLAS results on the nucleon resonance electroexcitation amplitudes has demonstrated a promising opportunity to extend the information on their $Q^2$evolution up to 10 ${\mathrm{GeV}}^2$. Together these results from CLAS and CLAS12 offer good prospects for probing the nucleon parton distributions at large fractional parton momenta $x$for $W<2.5$GeV, while covering the range of distances where the transition from the strongly coupled to the perturbative regimes is expected. 

We present the first threefold differential measurement for neutral-pion multiplicity ratios produced in semi-inclusive deep-inelastic electron scattering on carbon, iron, and lead nuclei normalized to deuterium from CLAS at Jefferson Lab. We found that the neutral-pion multiplicity ratio is maximally suppressed for the leading hadrons (energy fraction $z\to$1), suppression varying from 25% in carbon up to 75% in lead. An enhancement of the multiplicity ratio at low $z$and high $p_T^2$is observed, suggesting an interconnection between these two variables. This behavior is qualitatively similar to the previous twofold differential measurement of charged pions by the HERMES Collaboration and, recently, by CLAS Collaboration. The largest enhancement was observed at high $p_T^2$for heavier nuclei, namely, iron and lead, while the smallest enhancement was observed for the lightest nucleus, carbon. This behavior suggests a competition between partonic multiple scattering, which causes enhancement, and hadronic inelastic scattering, which causes suppression. 

Abstract One scenario for the generation of fast radio bursts (FRBs) is magnetic reconnection in a current sheet of the magnetar wind. Compressed by a strong magnetic pulse induced by a magnetar flare, the current sheet fragments into a self-similar chain of magnetic islands. Time-dependent plasma currents at their interfaces produce coherent radiation during their hierarchical coalescence. We investigate this scenario using 2D radiative relativistic particle-in-cell simulations to compute the efficiency of the coherent emission and to obtain frequency scalings. Consistent with expectations, a fraction of the reconnected magnetic field energy,f∼ 0.002, is converted to packets of high-frequency fast magnetosonic waves, which can escape from the magnetar wind as radio emission. In agreement with analytical estimates, we find that magnetic pulses of 10⁴⁷erg s⁻¹can trigger relatively narrowband GHz emission with luminosities of approximately 10⁴²erg s⁻¹, sufficient to explain bright extragalactic FRBs. The mechanism provides a natural explanation for a downward frequency drift of burst signals, as well as the ∼100 ns substructure recently detected inFRB 20200120E. 

Measurements of the polarization observables $\mathrm{\Sigma },\mathbf{P},\mathbf{T},{\mathbf{O}}_{\mathbf{x}},{\mathbf{O}}_{\mathbf{z}}$for the reaction $\vec{\gamma }p\to K_S^0{\mathrm{\Sigma }}^{+}$using a linearly polarized photon beam of energy 1.1 to 2.1 GeV are reported. The measured data provide information on a channel that has not been studied extensively, but is required for a full coupled-channel analysis in the nucleon resonance region. Observables have been simultaneously extracted using likelihood sampling with a Markov-Chain Monte Carlo process. Angular distributions in bins of photon energy $E_{\gamma }$are produced for each polarization observable. $\mathbf{T},{\mathbf{O}}_{\mathbf{x}}$, and ${\mathbf{O}}_{\mathbf{z}}$are first time measurements of these observables in this reaction. The extraction of $\mathrm{\Sigma }$extends the energy range beyond a previous measurement. The measurement of $\mathbf{P}$, the recoil polarization, is consistent with previous measurements. The measured data are shown to be significant enough to affect the estimation of the nucleon resonance parameters when fitted within a coupled-channels model. Published by the American Physical Society2025