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Bina Patel

Publications and source records attributed to Bina Patel.

4 recordsLinked to original sources

Causal Structure of Spacetime Singularities and Their Observable Signatures

We analyze the causal structure of horizonless compact objects via the light-cone geometry and conformal compactification of the Joshi-Malafarina-Narayan (JMN-1) and Janis-Newman-Winicour (JNW) spacetimes. Penrose diagrams reveal that JMN-1 undergoes a transition from timelike $(0<M_0<2/3)$ to null $(2/3<M_0<4/5)$ singularities, while JNW remains timelike throughout, in contrast to the spacelike singularity of the Schwarzschild spacetime. We show that photon spheres exist in Schwarzschild and JNW, but arise in JMN-1 only in the null singularity phase, establishing a direct link between causal character and null geodesic trapping. We further demonstrate that radial timelike geodesics develop turning points for certain parameter regimes in both JMN-1 and JNW spacetimes, indicating the emergence of effective repulsive behavior in the strong field region. These features lead to distinct strong field lensing and shadow signatures, potentially testable by very long baseline interferometric observations such as those of the Event Horizon Telescope.

gr-qc

Testing the Spacetime Geometry of Sgr A* with the Relativistic Orbit of S2 star

In this work, we perform a relativistic test of the spacetime geometry of Sagittarius A* (Sgr A*) using the orbit of the S2 star. We consider a broad class of compact object models, including Schwarzschild, Reissner-Nordstr\"om, Bardeen, Hayward, and Simpson-Visser black holes, as well as the Janis-Newman-Winicour naked singularity spacetime. For each geometry, we integrate the timelike geodesic equations and consistently project the resulting trajectories onto astrometric and spectroscopic observables, incorporating R{\o}mer time delay and relativistic redshift effects. The theoretical predictions are tested with current Very Large Telescope (VLT) observations of the S2 star, while simultaneously imposing constraints from the Event Horizon Telescope shadow size. We find that several spacetimes that are degenerate at the level of shadow imaging, most notably Schwarzschild, Reissner-Nordstr\"om, and Bardeen regular black hole geometries, remain statistically indistinguishable when tested against present S2 data. We further carry out a statistical model comparison based on the Akaike and Bayesian information criteria (AIC and BIC) to evaluate the relative performance of the alternative spacetime models. Our analysis also constrains the generalized charge like parameter $q/M$ in non-Schwarzschild spacetimes based on current S2 star observations, and identifies specific black hole and horizonless geometries that can be further tested with forthcoming high precision astrometric observations from the VLT and Keck telescopes.

gr-qc

DS@GT at CheckThat! 2025: A Simple Retrieval-First, LLM-Backed Framework for Claim Normalization

Claim normalization is an integral part of any automatic fact-check verification system. It parses the typically noisy claim data, such as social media posts into normalized claims, which are then fed into downstream veracity classification tasks. The CheckThat! 2025 Task 2 focuses specifically on claim normalization and spans 20 languages under monolingual and zero-shot conditions. Our proposed solution consists of a lightweight \emph{retrieval-first, LLM-backed} pipeline, in which we either dynamically prompt a GPT-4o-mini with in-context examples, or retrieve the closest normalization from the train dataset directly. On the official test set, the system ranks near the top for most monolingual tracks, achieving first place in 7 out of of the 13 languages. In contrast, the system underperforms in the zero-shot setting, highlighting the limitation of the proposed solution.

cs.CL

Cosmic acceleration with bulk viscosity in an anisotropic $f(R,L_m)$ background

In this article, we investigate the observed cosmic acceleration in the framework of a cosmological $f(R,L_m)$ model dominated by bulk viscous matter in an anisotropic background. We consider the LRS Bianchi type I metric and derive the Friedmann equations that drive the gravitational interactions in $f(R,L_m)$ gravity. Further, we assume the functional form $f(R,L_m)=\frac{R}{2}+L_m^\alpha $, where $\alpha$ is a free model parameter, and then find the exact solutions of fields equations corresponding to our viscous matter dominated model. We incorporate the updated H(z) data and the Pantheon data to acquire the best-fit values of parameters of our model by utilizing the $\chi^2$ minimization technique along with the Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) random sampling method. Further, we present the behavior of physical parameters that describe the universe's evolution phase, such as density, effective pressure and EoS parameters, skewness parameter, and the statefinder diagnostic parameters. We found that the energy density indicates expected positive behavior, whereas the negative behavior of bulk viscous pressure contributes to the universe's expansion. The effective EoS parameter favors the accelerating phase of the universe's expansion. Moreover, the skewness parameter shows the anisotropic nature of spacetime during the entire evolution phase of the universe. Finally, from statefinder diagnostic test, we found that our cosmological $f(R,L_m)$ model lies in the quintessence region, and it behaves like a de-Sitter universe in the far future. We analyze different energy conditions in order to test the consistency of the obtained solution. We found that all energy conditions except SEC show positive behavior, while the violation of SEC favors the recently observed acceleration with the transition from decelerated to an accelerated epoch of the universe's expansion in the recent past.

gr-qc