Strong Gravity

The last few years have seen new opportunities for
constraining the physics of neutron star interiors. I will first discuss the
current state of neutron star radius measurements and then go on to discuss
thermal tomography as a probe of the nuclear, magnetic, and transport
properties of neutron star crusts. In each case, I will emphasize the
astrophysics that must be understood to make reliable inferences about the
properties of dense matter from observations of neutron stars.

In the past few years, optical
cooling and manipulating of macroscopic objects, such as micro-mirrors and
cantilevers has developed into an active field of research.
In mechanical systems, the oscillator is attached to its suspension,
a thermal contact that limits the motion isolation. On the other hand, when
these small objects are levitated using the radiation pressure force of lasers,
the excellent thermal isolation even at room temperatures helps produce
very sensitive force detectors, and eventually quantum transducers for quantum

The relativistic wind of pulsars consists of toroidal
stripes of opposite magnetic field polarity, separated by current sheets of hot
plasma. By means of 2D and 3D particle-in-cell simulations, we investigate
particle acceleration and magnetic field dissipation at the termination shock
of a striped pulsar wind. At the shock, the flow compresses and the alternating
fields annihilate by driven magnetic reconnection. Irrespective of the stripe
wavelength "lambda" or the wind magnetization "sigma" (in

Neutron stars possess the strongest gravitational fields
among stellar objects in the Universe that are not surrounded by a horizon.
This causes the emission from their surfaces to be strongly lensed and
deformed. Two upcoming space X-ray missions, ESA's LOFT and NASA's NICER, aim
to use observations of lightcurves from spinning neutron stars to map their
gravitational fields as well as measure their masses and radii. In this talk, I
will discuss some unexpected strong-field phenomena that affect gravitational