Flares from the Tidal Disruption of Stars by Massive Black Holes

Tidal disruption flares are differentiated into two classes -- those which are sub-Eddington and those which radiate near the Eddington limit. Flares from black holes above ~2 x 10^7 M_\odot will generally not radiate above the Eddington limit. For a Schwarzschild black hole, the maximum bolometric luminosity of a tidal disruption is ~L_Edd(5 x 10^7 M_\odot), substantially below the Eddington luminosities of the most massive disrupting black holes (~2 x 10^8 M_\odot). Bolometric corrections to the spectra of the brightest flares are found to be large (~7.5 mag). Nevertheless, the brightest flares are likely to have absolute magnitudes in excess of -19 in V and -21 in U (in the absence of reddening). Because the spectra are so blue, K-corrections may actually brighten the flares in optical bands. If such flares are as frequent as believed, they may soon be detected in low or high redshift supernovae searches. The He II ionizing radiation produced in the flares may dominate that which is produced by all other sources in the centers of quiescent galaxies, creating a steady state, highly ionized, fossil nebula with an extent of ~1 kpc which may be observable in recombination lines.Comment: 21 pages with 4 figures, AAS Latex, ApJ Submitte

On Mordell-Weil groups of Jacobians over function fields

We study the arithmetic of abelian varieties over $K=k(t)$ where $k$ is an arbitrary field. The main result relates Mordell-Weil groups of certain Jacobians over $K$ to homomorphisms of other Jacobians over $k$. Our methods also yield completely explicit points on elliptic curves with unbounded rank over \Fpbar(t) and a new construction of elliptic curves with moderately high rank over \C(t).Comment: v1: 25 pages; v2=v1, ignore; v3: Corrects rank formula when the covers C_d or D_d are reducible and includes other minor improvements and simplification

Quarkonium Production with the CMS Experiment

Results from studies of quarkonium production are presented from the CMS experiment at the LHC in proton-proton collisions at sqrt(s) = 7 TeV. We report measurements of the ratio of chi_c2/chi_c1 production versus transverse momentum and Upsilon(nS) production vs rapidity and transverse momentum for the 1S, 2S and 3S states. Reconstruction of Bc mesons is also presented in two decay channels.Comment: Submitted as written proceedings for a talk given at the 2012 International Conference on High Energy Physics (ICHEP 2012), Melbourne, Australi