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Very-long-baseline interferometry (VLBI) observations of active galactic nuclei at millimetre wavelengths have the power to reveal the launching and initial collimation region of extragalactic radio jets, down to 10–100 gravitational radii (rg ≡ GM/c2) scales in nearby sources. Centaurus A is the closest radio-loud source to Earth. It bridges the gap in mass and accretion rate between the supermassive black holes (SMBHs) in Messier 87 and our Galactic Centre. A large southern declination of −43° has, however, prevented VLBI imaging of Centaurus A below a wavelength of 1 cm thus far. Here we show the millimetre VLBI image of the source, which we obtained with the Event Horizon Telescope at 228 GHz. Compared with previous observations, we image the jet of Centaurus A at a tenfold higher frequency and sixteen times sharper resolution and thereby probe sub-lightday structures. We reveal a highly collimated, asymmetrically edge-brightened jet as well as the fainter counterjet. We find that the source structure of Centaurus A resembles the jet in Messier 87 on ~500 rg scales remarkably well. Furthermore, we identify the location of Centaurus A’s SMBH with respect to its resolved jet core at a wavelength of 1.3 mm and conclude that the source’s event horizon shadow should be visible at terahertz frequencies. This location further supports the universal scale invariance of black holes over a wide range of masses.
We report on the first steps of an ongoing project to add gauge observables and gauge corrections
to the well-studied strong coupling limit of staggered lattice QCD, which has been shown earlier
to be amenable to numerical simulations by the worm algorithm in the chiral limit and at finite
density. Here we show how to evaluate the expectation value of the Polyakov loop in the framework
of the strong coupling limit at finite temperature, allowing to study confinement properties
along with those of chiral symmetry breaking. We find the Polyakov loop to rise smoothly, thus
signalling deconfinement. The non-analytic nature of the chiral phase transition is reflected in the
derivative of the Polyakov loop. We also discuss how to construct an effective theory for non-zero
lattice coupling, which is valid to O(b).
QCD at finite temperature and denisty remains intractable by Monte Carlo simulations for quark
chemical potentials m >∼T. It has been a long standing problem to derive effective theories from
QCD which describe the phase structure of the former with controlled errors. We propose a
solution to this problem by a combination of analytical and numerical methods. Starting from
lattice QCD with in Wilson’s formulation, we derive an effective action in terms of Polyakov
loops by means of combined strong coupling and hopping expansions. The theory correctly
reflects the centre-symmetry in the pure gauge limit and its breaking through quarks. It is valid
for heavy quarks and lattices up to Nt ∼ 6. Its sign problem can be solved and we are able to
calculate the deconfinement transition of QCD with heavy quarks for all chemical potentials.
We extend the recently developed strong coupling, dimensionally reduced Polyakov-loop effective theory from finite-temperature pure Yang-Mills to include heavy fermions and nonzero chemical
potential by means of a hopping parameter expansion. Numerical simulation is employed to investigate the weakening of the deconfinement transition as a function of the quark mass. The
tractability of the sign problem in this model is exploited to locate the critical surface in the (M/T,m/T,T) space over the whole range of chemical potentials from zero up to infinity.