Quantization of the electromagnetic field outside static black holes and its application to low-energy phenomena

We discuss the Gupta-Bleuler quantization of the free electromagnetic field outside static black holes in the Boulware vacuum. We use a gauge which reduces to the Feynman gauge in Minkowski spacetime. We also discuss its relation with gauges used previously. Then we apply the low-energy sector of this held theory to investigate some low-energy phenomena. First, we discuss the response rate of a static charge outside the Schwarzschild black hole in four dimensions. Next, motivated by string physics, we compute the absorption cross sections of low-energy plane waves for the Schwarzschild and extreme Reissner-Nordstrom black holes in arbitrary dimensions higher than three.

Directed search for gravitational waves from Scorpius X-1 with initial LIGO data

We present results of a search for continuously emitted gravitational radiation, directed at the brightest low-mass x-ray binary, Scorpius X-1. Our semicoherent analysis covers 10 days of LIGO S5 data ranging from 50-550 Hz, and performs an incoherent sum of coherent F-statistic power distributed amongst frequency-modulated orbital sidebands. All candidates not removed at the veto stage were found to be consistent with noise at a 1% false alarm rate. We present Bayesian 95% confidence upper limits on gravitational-wave strain amplitude using two different prior distributions: a standard one, with no a priori assumptions about the orientation of Scorpius X-1; and an angle-restricted one, using a prior derived from electromagnetic observations. Median strain upper limits of 1.3 x 10(-24) and 8 x 10(-25) are reported at 150 Hz for the standard and angle-restricted searches respectively. This proof-of-principle analysis was limited to a short observation time by unknown effects of accretion on the intrinsic spin frequency of the neutron star, but improves upon previous upper limits by factors of similar to 1.4 for the standard, and 2.3 for the angle-restricted search at the sensitive region of the detector.