Estudos de perturbações em sistemas gravitacionais no âmbito da Relatividade Geral vêm sofrendo grandes desenvolvimentos nos últimos anos, especialmente em face da evolução dos modernos detectores de ondas gravitacionais. Abordamos neste trabalho as perturbações de diferentes cenários. Principiamos com a métrica de Vaidya, utilizada para descrever espaços-tempos esfericamente simétricos e dependentes do tempo. Nossas simulações mostraram que as freqüências dos modos quasi-normais (MQN\'s) apresentam um novo efeito inercial para variações rápidas da função de massa, retornando depois ao comportamento adiabático. Em seguida, apresentamos um modelo para a evaporação de mini buracos negros por radiação de Hawking inspirado no cenário de criação destes objetos em aceleradores de partículas, previsto pelas novas teorias com dimensões extras. Nosso modelo, baseado na métrica de Vaidya n-dimensional, tornou possível a análise de MQN\'s resultando na possibilidade de se obter os parâmetros relevantes do buraco negro, como a sua massa inicial e o número de dimensões extras, a partir de medições experimentais. Finalmente, realizamos um estudo sobre uma nova solução denominada gravastar, proposta como um modelo alternativo para o estágio final de estrelas com grande massa. Obtivemos limites para os parâmetros da solução e verificamos a sua estabilidade frente a perturbações axiais, concluindo positivamente a respeito da possibilidade de se distinguir entre buracos negros e gravastares com base no seu espectro de MQN\'s. / Perturbative studies of gravitational systems in General Relativity have gone through big developments in the last years, especially due to the evolution of the modern gravitational wave detectors. We consider in this work different perturbations in different scenarios. Firstly we consider the Vaidya metric, mainly used to describe time-dependent spherically symmetric spacetimes. Our simulations show that the frequencies of the quasinormal modes (QNM\'s) present a new inertial effect for rapidly varying mass functions, returning afterwards to the adiabatic behavior. Next we present a model for evaporating mini black holes in particle accelerators, in the context of the new gravity models with extra dimensions. With our model, based on the n-dimensional Vaidya metric, we are able to perform a QNM analysis which results in the possibility of obtaining the parameters of the black hole, such as its initial mass and the number of extra dimensions, from the experimental measurements. Finally, we present a study of a new solution, the gravastar, proposed as an alternative model for the end state of massive stars. We obtain bounds for the parameters of the solution and verify its stability against axial perturbations. Our results indicate that the gravastar\'s QNM spectrum can indeed be used to distinguish a black hole from a gravastar.

A search for Beyond the Standard Model physics is performed with the ATLAS detector in the opposite sign dimuon channel using the 20 fb 1 of data collected in 2012 at √s = 8 TeV. No excess is found above the Standard Model expectation. Using a Bayesian statistical analysis, model dependent 95% Credibility Level Bayesian exclusion limits are extracted for two models of gravitationally-related beyond the Standard Model phenomena. For the ADD and RS quantum black hole models, limits of 3.32 and 1.95 TeV are set on the extradimensional Planck Scale, and for ADD Large Extra dimensions, limits ranging from 2.8-4.4 TeV are set on the string scale for the GRW, HLZ and Hewett formalisms. In addition, a study is performed to estimate the effect of increasing noise cuts in the ATLAS Level-1 Calorimeter Trigger on the physics efficiency of W ! e and t¯t and on the Level-1 missing transverse energy trigger rate. Results suggest that higher noise cuts could reduce the Level-1 missing transverse energy trigger rate with a minimal loss of physics efficiency.

The Galactic center supermassive black hole (SMBH) Sagittarius A* (Sgr A*) is the closest such object and thus is an ideal target for investigation of galactic nuclei and their activity cycles. Its remarkable underluminous X-ray state is punctuated by outbursts on different time and energy scales. This thesis presents a study of past, current and possible future X-ray outburst activities from Sgr A*, using the hard X-ray telescope NuSTAR. Indication of substantial past Sgr A* activity, similar to that observed in low-luminosity active Galactic nuclei, has come from the Galactic center molecular clouds (GCMCs). Using these X-ray reflecting GCMCs, I have studied the characters of past Sgr A* X-ray outbursts. The current X-ray quiescence of Sgr A* is punctuated by directly detectable flares. The radiation mechanism and physical process of these X-ray flares are poorly understood. From about 1 Ms NuSTAR observations of Sgr A*, I collected nine bright X-ray flares. I studied their timing behavior and the correlation between flares' strengths and their spectra. Future Sgr A* X-ray activity could increase due to the infall of a gas cloud G2 into this SMBH. Finally, I present the Galactic center cosmic-ray population revealed by non-thermal X-ray filaments and its connection to Sgr A* outbursts.

A finalidade deste trabalho é estabelecer as conexões entre física de buracos negros e termodinâmica, atentando para eventuais semelhanças e diferenças entre ramos aparentemente bem diversos da física moderna. Tais conexões foram inicialmente buscadas e estabelecidas na década de 1970, graças ao trabalho de S. Hawking e Jacob D. Bekenstein, entre outros, e sucessivamente aprofundadas nos anos subseqüentes, notadamente na última década. O mérito maior do primeiro foi estabelecer a emissão de radiação com espectro térmico por buracos negros em geral, mesmo aqueles desprovidos de rotação e carga (buracos negros de Schwarzschild). O segundo encarregou-se de correlacionar leis termodinâmicas clássicas com processos envolvendo buracos negros. Neste trabalho, procuramos inicialmente estudar os buracos negros de Schwarzschild e Kerr-Newman no tocante às suas propriedades gerais, bem como o problema do movimento de partículas nos espaços-tempos em questão, para discutir-se brevemente o problema de extração de energia de buracos negros, como apontado por Penrose e outros. Estabelecidas as propriedades gerais, pode-se enfim derivar a Termodinâmica destes buracos, correlacionando-se entropia e área, e obter expressões para a temperatura de corpo negro dos mesmos - em perfeita consonância com a derivação de Hawking, não abordada aqui, feita através da Teoria Quântica de Campos. Com a temperatura, pode-se estudar as capacidades térmicas, reveladores de propriedades típicas de buracos negros não compartilhadas por sistemas clássicos. A reboque destas, entra a discussão sobre a estabilidade termodinâmica de buracos negros em ensembles canônicos e microcanônicos, através do método das séries lineares, de Poincaré, fechando o presente trabalho. Assim, os capítulos 1 e 2 tratam das soluções de Schwarzschild e Kerr-Newman, respectivamente, abordando-lhes as propriedades gerais e o problema do movimento de partículas, materiais ou não, nessas geometrias. O capítulo 3 estabelece as pontes entre Termodinâmica e buracos negros, sendo crucial para o restante do trabalho. No capítulo 4 estudamos temperaturas e capacidades térmicas de diversos buracos negros, e finalmente no capítulo 5 vem o problema da estabilidade termodinâmica dos buracos negros. / In the present work, we have established the connections between black-hole physics and thermodynamics, searching for similarities and differences between these two branches of physicxs, which might look quite far apart. Such links were first sought for and established during the 1970s, thanks to the pioneering work of S. Hawking and Jacob D. Bekenstein, among others, and continuously developed in the following years, notably in the last decade. Hawking's major achievement was the prediction, from arguments based on Quantum Field Theory, that black holes radiate with a thermal spectrum, even the uncharged and nonrotating ones (the Schwarzschild black holes). Bekenstein's biggest merit was to find the link between classical thermodynamical laws and processes involving black holes. In this work, we started with Schwarzschild and Kerr-Newman black holes, working out their general properties, as well as the problem of particle motion in such spacetimes, so that we could briefly discuss the issue of energy extraction from black holes, as established by Penrose and others. Once the general features of these black holes were known, it was possible to derive the black-hole thermodynamics, due to a simple relation between black-hole entropy and area. Expressions for the black-hole temperature were then easily obtained, in perfect agreement with Hawking's own derivation, not considered here. With temperatures at hand, heat capacities could be thoroughly examined, showing intrinsic properties of black holes, not shared by classical systems. The question of thermodynamic stability of black holes arose naturally from heat capacity analysis, and we have analysed black holes in both the microcanonical and canonical ensembles, in the light of Poincaré's linear series method, completing the current work. Chapters 1 and 2 deal with the Schwarzschild and Kerr-Newman solutions, respectively, deriving their general features and working out particle motion in these geometries. Chapter 3 establishes the links between black-hole physics and thermodynamics, being of crucial importance for the subsequent chapters. Chapter 4 provides an extensive study of black-hole temperatures and heat capacities, paving the way for the last chapter, Chapter 5, concerning to thermodynamic stability of black holes.

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Blazars, a subclass of active galactic nuclei with powerful relativistic plasma jets, are among the most luminous and violently variable objects in the universe. They emit radiation across the entire electromagnetic spectrum, and often change in brightness over the course of hours or days. Different emission mechanisms are necessary in order to explain the observed flux in different frequency ranges. In the ultraviolet-optical- infrared regime these include components that arise from: 1) polarized synchrotron radiation emanating from a powerful parsec-scale jet flowing from near the central accreting black hole, 2) a multi-temperature accretion disk emitting thermal radia- tion, and 3) an optically thick dusty torus located several parsecs from the central engine that absorbs and re-emits, at infrared wavelengths, radiation originating in the accretion disk. The goal of this study is to determine the relative importance of these spectral components in the spectra of blazars. I use data from the Spitzer Space Telescope in order to search for the presence of the dusty torus surrounding four blazars, as well as to determine its luminosity and temperature. In two of the observed sources, 1222+216 and CTA102, I determine that the torus can be modeled as a 1200 K blackbody emitting at nearly 10 46 erg s −1 . Furthermore, I determine the relative variability of the accretion disk of a sample of blazars by using spec- tropolarimetry observations to separate the optical-UV spectrum into a polarized viiicomponent, consisting of radiation described by a power-law F ν ∝ ν −α , and an ac- cretion disk which consists of a thin disk described by the power-law F disk ∝ ν 1/3 plus a hot-spot of variable temperature. The spectra of several blazars are explained by a version of this model in which the thin disk component is held constant, while the blackbody varies on timescales of approximately years resulting with a flux of the blackbody component comparable to the power-law disk component. I find that variations in the emission from the hot-spot occurs approximately within 100 days of γ-ray variations.

To constrain the era when the first galaxies and stars appeared upcoming instruments will rely on the brightest events in the universe: supernovae and brilliant emission from massive black holes. In this dissertation, we investigate the observability of certain types of supernovae of the very first stars (Population III stars) and find that while these events are sufficiently luminous to be observed with deep-sky instruments such as the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), they may not observe these particular types of events in their lifetimes. We next explore the origins of massive black holes and introduce the direct collapse hypothesis of supermassive black hole formation. We model CR7, an apparently metal-free, luminous, Lyman-alpha emitting galaxy, as if it were powered by a massive direct collapse black hole and find that such a black hole can account for CR7's impressive Lyman-alpha flux. We finally investigate the nature of the connection between water megamasers, very bright radio sources originating from population inversion in dense, shocked gas around massive black holes and hydroxyl megamasers which generally accompany star formation. We carry out a ~ 60 hour radio survey for water emission among galaxies hosting OH megamaser hosts to assess the connection between the two types of emission. We find marginally statistically significant evidence that OH megamasers exclude water kilomasers and confirm with high levels of significance (> 8 sigma) the presence of a water megamaser in II Zw 96, establishing this object as the second galaxy known to cohost simultaneous water and hydroxyl megamasers.

In this thesis we accomplish two goals: We construct a two dimensional conformal field theory (CFT), in the form of a Liouville theory, in the near horizon limit for three and four dimensions black holes. The near horizon CFT assumes the two dimensional black hole solutions that were first introduced by Christensen and Fulling (1977 Phys. Rev. D 15 2088-104) and later expanded to a greater class of black holes via Robinson and Wilczek (2005 Phys. Rev. Lett. 95 011303). The two dimensions black holes admit a $Diff(S^1)$ or Witt subalgebra, which upon quantization in the horizon limit becomes Virasoro with calculable central charge. These charges and lowest Virasoro eigen-modes reproduce the correct Bekenstein-Hawking entropy of the four and three dimensions black holes via the Cardy formula (Bl"ote et al 1986 Phys. Rev. Lett. 56 742; Cardy 1986 Nucl. Phys. B 270 186). Furthermore, the two dimensions CFT's energy momentum tensor is anomalous, i.e. its trace is nonzero. However, In the horizon limit the energy momentum tensor becomes holomorphic equaling the Hawking flux of the four and three dimensions black holes. This encoding of both entropy and temperature provides a uniformity in the calculation of black hole thermodynamics and statistical quantities for the non local effective action approach. We also show that the near horizon regime of a Kerr-Newman-$AdS$ ($KNAdS$) black hole, given by its two dimensional analogue a la Robinson and Wilczek, is asymptotically $AdS_2$ and dual to a one dimensional quantum conformal field theory (CFT). The $s$-wave contribution of the resulting CFT's energy-momentum-tensor together with the asymptotic symmetries, generate a centrally extended Virasoro algebra, whose central charge reproduces the Bekenstein-Hawking entropy via Cardy's Formula. Our derived central charge also agrees with the near extremal Kerr/CFT Correspondence in the appropriate limits. We also compute the Hawking temperature of the $KNAdS$ black hole by coupling its Robinson and Wilczek two dimensional analogue (RW2DA) to conformal matter.

The abundance of molecular hydrogen (H2), the primary coolant in primordial gas, is critical for the thermodynamic evolution and star–formation histories in early protogalaxies. Suppression of H2–cooling in early protogalaxies can occur via photodissociation of H2 (by ultraviolet Lyman–Werner [LW] photons) or by photodetachment of H−, a precursor in H2 formation (by infrared [IR] photons). It is widely believed that the formation of the first massive black hole “seeds,” with masses 104−6 M⊙, in primordial halos may be enabled if H2–cooling is suppressed. We study the radiative feedback processes that suppress H2–cooling in primordial proto- galaxies. Previous studies have typically adopted idealized spectra, with a blackbody or a power–law shape, in modeling the chemistry of metal–free protogalaxies, and utilized a single parameter, the critical UV flux, or Jcrit, to determine whether H2–cooling is prevented. This can be misleading, as independent of the spectral shape, there is a a critical curve in the (kLW,kH−) plane, where kLW and kH− are the H2–dissociation rates by LW and IR photons, which determines whether a protogalaxy can cool below ∼ 1000 Kelvin. In Chapter 1, we use a one–zone model to follow the chemical and thermal evolution of gravitationally collapsing protogalactic gas, to compute this critical curve, and provide an accurate analytical fit for it. We improve on previous works by considering a variety of more realistic Pop III or Pop II-type spectra from population synthesis models and perform fully frequency–dependent calculations of the H2–photodissociation rates for each spectrum. We compute the ratio kLW/kH− for each spectrum, as well as the minimum stellar mass M∗, for various IMFs and metallicities, required to prevent cooling in a neighboring halo a distance d away. We provide critical M∗/d2 values for suppression of H2–cooling, with analytic fits, which can be used in future studies. Determining the photodissociation rate of H2 by an incident LW flux is crucial, but prohibitively expensive to calculate on the fly in simulations. The rate is sensitive to the H2 rovibrational distribution, which in turn depends on the gas density, temperature, and incident LW radiation field. In Chapter 2, we use the publicly available cloudy package to model primordial gas clouds and compare exact photodissociation rate calculations to commonly–used fitting formulae. We find the fit from Wolcott-Green et al. (2011) is most accurate for moderate densities n ∼ 103cm−3 and temperatures, T ∼ 103K, and we provide a new fit, which captures the increase in the rate at higher densities and temperatures, owing to the increased excited rovibrational populations in this regime. Our new fit has typical errors of a few percent percent up to n ≤ 107 cm−3, T ≤ 8000K, and H2 column density NH2 ≤ 1017 cm−2, and can be easily utilized in simulations. We also show that pumping of the excited rovibrational states of H2 by a strong LW flux further modifies the level populations when the gas density is low, and noticeably decreases self-shielding for J21 > 103 and n < 102cm−3. This may lower the “critical flux” at which primordial gas remains H2–poor in some protogalaxies, enabling massive black hole seed formation. In Chapter 3, we study the thermal evolution of UV–irradiated atomic cooling halos using high–resolution three–dimensional hydrodynamic simulations. We consider the effect of H− photodetachment by Lyα cooling radiation in the optically–thick cores of three such halos, a process which has not been included in previous simulations. H− is a precursor of molecular hydrogen, and therefore, its destruction can diminish the H2 abundance and cooling. We find that the critical UV flux for suppressing H2–cooling is decreased by up to a factor of a few when H− photodetachment by Lyα is included. In a more conservative estimate of the trapped Lyα energy density, we find the critical flux is decreased by ∼ 15 − 50 per cent. Our results suggest that Lyα radiation may have an important effect on the thermal evolution of UV–irradiated halos, and therefore on the potential for massive black hole formation.