Maurice van Putten


Phone: (617)253-4824
Room NW17-161
       
 


Ph.D., 1992, CalTech
mvp@ligo.mit.edu

Qualifie Professeur des universites, 29-Constituants elementaires, France (09129197780)

 

 

Research Interests

Maurice van Putten studies nonthermal transient sources with emissions in gravitational waves, UHECRs and radio. His main focus is radiation processes induced by flows in forced turbulence around rotating black holes with applications to UHECRs, GRBs and radio-bursts in connection with the Pierre Auger Observatory, HETE II, Swift and BATSE, and the Nancay Radio Telescope. An outlook for long-duration bursts in GWs and radio for LIGO-Virgo/LOFAR associated with long GRBs - from binary coalescence and collapsars - is shown below (adapted from van Putten, 2009, MNRAS Lett., Early View Online)


July 28, 2009, invited seminar Caltech-LIGO; July 31 astro-lunch seminar at UCSB
Stirred, not shaken: The Nonthermal Transient Universe from rotating black holes


June 15, 2009, invited lecture at Radboud University, Nijmegen, The Netherlands
The Nonthermal Transient Universe -- A Unified Picture

Ultra-high energy cosmic rays (UHECRs) and gamma-ray bursts (GRBs) are the most exceptional nonthermal transient events, that appear to be associated with black holes. Here, we describe radiation mechanisms induced by turbulent flows around rapidly rotating black holes: high-energy emissions due to frame-dragging along the black hole spin-axis and low-energy emissions by a torus. High-energy emissions arise, concurrently, in photons and, upstream of an outgoing Alfv\'en front, in ionic contaminants by linear acceleration. For supermassive black holes, the latter can develop into ultra-high energy cosmic rays (UHECRs) about the Greisen-Zatsepin-Kuzmin (GZK) threshold in low-luminosity, intermittent active galactic nuclei, e.g., Seyfert galaxies consistent with recent results of the Pierre Auger Observatory. The photon emissions give rise to bursts from stellar mass black holes in collapsars and mergers of neutron stars with another neutron star or companion black hole. Their intrinsic light curve features an exponential decay, which we recover in a normalized average of 600 light curves of long GRBs (joint work with A.C. Gupta). This model explains long GRBs with and without supernovae and a diversity in their X-ray afterglows, whose total output agrees with the observed peak and true energies in gamma-rays. We conclude that long GRBs are spin-powered. Most of the energy output is unseen in gravitational radiation from the surrounding turbulent flows, which enables novel metrology on the mass of stellar mass black holes in long GRBs. Long GRBs from naked inner engines produced in mergers produce long-duration radio-bursts that may be seen in all-sky surveys by the Low Frequency Array (LOFAR). Scaled to the supermassive black hole in SgrA*, the same mechanism predicts a luminosity in low-frequency gravitational waves that might be of interest to the planned Laser Interferometric Space Antenna (LISA). The Nonthermal Transient Universe

Research Accomplishments

* On the origin of long gamma-ray bursts with an outlook on LIGO-Virgo and, in the radio, for LOFAR/SKA (joint work with Amir Levinson).
* Discovery of black hole spin-down in the gamma-ray light curves of long GRBs in the BATSE catalogue (joint work with Alok C. Gupta) with indications for the creation of astronomical amounts of Bekenstein-Hawking entropy in long GRBs.
* Prediction of X-ray afterglow emissions from short bursts (with Eve C. Ostriker, 2001), confirmed by HETE II and Swift in 2005.
* Spectral energy correlation for prompt GRB-emissions of long bursts, in agreement with HETE II and Swift data with a Pearson coefficient of 0.84.
* A correlation of UHECRs with the mass and lifetime of intermittent and low-luminosity AGN, such as Seyferts, by a relativistic capillary effect powered by spinning supermassive black holes, in agreement with Pierre Auger observations.
* Hyperbolic formulations of general relativity in the Hamiltonian formalism using a novel curvature-driven lapse function, and in SO(3,1) (with Douglas M. Eardley) following his earlier work in covariant hyperbolic formulations for magnetohydrodynamics in SU(N) applied to the first-ever time-dependent numerical simulations of fully relativistic jets (1993,1996).

Public Outreach

In 2008, he was invited to testify at a Congressional Hearing in The Hague on energy legislation (with A.F.P. van Putten), based on an Invited Report to the Minister of Economic affairs (ISBN 0-978-90-9022005-5).

Some recent publications

1. On the origin of long gamma-ray bursts, 2009, MNRAS Lett., DOI: 10.1111/j.1745-3933.2009.00666.x (Early View Online)
2. Nonthermal transient sources from rotating black holes, 2009, MNRAS, 394, 2238 (with Alok C. Gupta)
3. Nonthermal high-energy emissions from black holes by a relativistic capillary effect, 2008, Astroph. J. Lett., 685, L63
4. Gravitational-wave forms from Kerr black holes interacting with high-density matter, 2008, Astroph. J. Lett., 684, L91
5. Superradiance in a torus magnetosphere around a black hole Science(1999); Detecting energy emissions from a rotating black hole cover of Science(2002) (with A. Levinson)
6. Global spectral representations of black holes in the complex plane cover of the Proc. Nat. Acad. Sc. (2006)
7. Gravitational Radiation, Luminous Black Holes and Gamma-Ray Burst Supernovae (Cambridge University Press (2005), with a foreword by Prof. Gerard 't Hooft).
8. Discovery of linear asymptotic behavior at micro-Kelvin resolution in a modulated Rayleigh-Benard chamber Proc. Roy. Soc. London A (2007) ( US Pat. 7,246,519 (2007), Approved by the State of California (2008))
9. Book Chapter, in Kerr Spacetime: Rotating Black Holes in General Relativity, D.L. Wiltshire, M. Visser and S.M. Scott, eds. (Cambridge University Press, 2009)
10. Discovery of recurrent multiple brain states in non-convulsive status epilepticus (with M.J.A.M. van Putten), 2007, Clin. Neurophys., 118:2798

Fall 2008

Invited for the 2008-2009 Studium Chair position at the University of Orleans

Fall 2007

Visiting Distinguished Full Professor at the Department of Physics, Nanjing University, to teach Topics and Numerical Methods in Relativity
Course outline
Lecture 1: Scales in Gravitation
Lecture 2: Beyond Galileo and Newton
Lecture 3: Lensing in Curved Spacetime
Lecture 4: Gravitational Collapse I
Lecture 5: Gravitational Collapse II
Lecture 6: Gravitational Collapse III
Lecture 7: Black Holes interacting with High-Density Matter
Lecture 8: Curvature around Spinning Black Holes
Lecture 9: Gravitational Spin-Orbit Interactions and E=omega J
Lecture 10: Gravitational Radiation
Lecture 11: Black Hole Spacetimes in the Complex Plane
PS1 PS2 PS3 PS4 PS5 PS6 PS7 PS8 PS9
Sln1 Sln2 Sln3 Sln4 Sln5 Sln6 Sln7 Sln7b

Press

Book Review (2007)
MIT Press Release (2002)
MIT/NASA Press Release (2003)
Honouring Roy Kerr, TV3 New Zealand Evening News (August 2004), Interview

SOFTWARE RELEASE JETLAB F90


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