We report the experimental observation of the spin-Hall effect in a two-dimensional (2D) hole system with Rashba spin-orbit coupling. The 2D hole layer is a part of a p-n junction light-emitting diode with a specially designed vertical and planar geometry which allows an angle-resolved polarization detection at opposite edges of the 2D hole system. In equilibrium the angular momenta of the Rash...

A striking property of an electric charge near a magnetic pole is that the system possesses angular momentum even when both the electric and the magnetic charges are at rest. The angular momentum is proportional to the product of the charges and independent of their distance. We analyze the effect of bringing gravitation into this remarkable system. To this end, we study an electric charge held...

New black-hole mass estimates are presented for a sample of 72 AGN covering three decades in optical luminosity. Using a sub-sample of Seyfert galaxies, which have blackhole mass estimates from both reverberation mapping and stellar velocity dispersions, we investigate the geometry of the AGN broad-line region (BLR). It is demonstrated that a model in which the orbits of the line-emitting mater...

We study propagation of D0-brane in two-dimensional Lorentzian black hole backgrounds by the method of boundary conformal field theory of SL(2,R)/U(1) supercoset at level k. Typically, such backgrounds arise as near-horizon geometries of k coincident non-extremal NS5-branes, where 1/k measures curvature of the backgrounds in string unit and hence size of string worldsheet effects. At classical ...

In this review, we summarize exact results for the three-dimensional BTZ black hole. We use rigorous mathematical results to clarify the general structure and properties of this black hole spacetime and its microscopic description. In particular, we study the formation of the black hole by point particle collisions, leading to an exact analytic determination of the Choptuik scaling parameter. W...