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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.

 

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.

 

The double-spin-polarization observable E for γ p → pπ0 has been measured with the CEBAF Large Acceptance Spectrometer (CLAS) at photon beam energies Eγ from 0.367 to 2.173 GeV (corresponding to center-ofmass energies from 1.240 to 2.200 GeV) for pion center-ofmass angles, cos θc.m. π0 , between − 0.86 and 0.82. These new CLAS measurements cover a broader energy range and have smaller uncertainties compared to previous CBELSA data and provide an important independent check on systematics. These measurements are compared to predictions as well as new global fits from The George Washington University, Mainz, and Bonn-Gatchina groups. Their inclusion in multipole analyses will allow us to refine our understanding of the single-pion production contribution to the Gerasimov-Drell- Hearn sum rule and improve the determination of resonance properties, which will be presented in a future publication.