Institute for Advanced Study / Princeton University Joint Astrophysics Colloquium

The boundaries of relativistic black hole jets—at the interface between the jet and the disk wind—lie at the core of our recent understanding of jet-powered phenomena. They harbor intense velocity and magnetic shears, which provide the free energy needed to power a number of observational signatures. We demonstrate that magnetic reconnection—a process by which opposite field lines annihilate, releasing their energy to the plasma—ultimately governs dissipation of the free energy at jet boundaries. Reconnection resulting from the nonlinear evolution of Kelvin-Helmholtz-type vortices can naturally explain the limb-brightened radio emission of AGN jets, such as M87. Inverse Compton scattering within the chain of magnetic islands / flux ropes self-consistently created by reconnection at the jet boundary can power the mysterious hard X-ray “coronal” emission of X-ray binaries. We also argue that reconnection-driven hadronic acceleration in the coronal regions of NGC 1068 may be the source of the TeV neutrinos recently detected by IceCube.