Benoit Cerutti - Electrodynamics of black hole magnetospheres: jets, current sheets and particle acceleration

Friday 28 Nov 2025, 10:30 → 12:00 Europe/Berlin

Black holes are the central engines of some of the most spectacular
high-energy astrophysical phenomena. The activity of black holes is
often associated with accretion and the launching of a relativistic
magnetized jet within the innermost regions: the magnetosphere.
Similarly to their non-relativistic analog in the Solar System, these
magnetospheres are highly dynamical and prone to abrupt large-scale
reconfigurations: current sheets form and magnetic field lines
reconnect, leading to efficient particle acceleration, pair production
and non-thermal radiation. However, the interplay between general
relativity, quantum electrodynamics and plasma physics makes this
problem not easily tractable. In this talk, I will review current
efforts to model black hole magnetospheres from first principles by
means of global high-performance computing plasma simulations. Results
will be discussed in the context of recent horizon-scale observations of
the weakly active supermassive black holes M87* and Sgr A*.