Wednesday, August 06, 2014

Argentine activist Estela Carlotto finds grandson abducted 35 years ago by military dictatorship

Argentine activist Estela Carlotto finds grandson abducted 35 years ago by military dictatorship:



"Buenos Aires: The long-lost grandson of the head of an Argentine rights group that has fought to find babies stolen by the 1976-1983 military dictatorship has been found after a 35-year search."



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Sunday, August 03, 2014

[1310.4478] The leading eikonal operator in string-brane scattering at high energy

[1310.4478] The leading eikonal operator in string-brane scattering at high energy:



"In this paper we present two (a priori independent) derivations of the eikonal operator in string-brane scattering. The first one is obtained by summing surfaces with any number of boundaries, while in the second one the eikonal operator is derived from the three-string vertex in a suitable light-cone gauge. This second derivation shows that the bosonic oscillators present in the leading eikonal operator are to be identified with the string bosonic oscillators in a suitable light-cone gauge, while the first one shows that it exponentiates recovering unitarity. This paper is a review of results obtained in two previous publications of the same authors."



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Saturday, August 02, 2014

Paul Émile Appell - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Paul Émile Appell - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia:



 "Paul Appell (27 September 1855 in Strasbourg – 24 October 1930 in Paris), also known as Paul Émile Appel, was a French mathematician and Rector of the University of Paris. The concept of Appell polynomials is named after him, as is rue Paul Appell in the 14th arrondissement of Paris."



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[1406.1285] The Appell Function $F_1$ and Regge String Scattering Amplitudes

[1406.1285] The Appell Function $F_1$ and Regge String Scattering Amplitudes:



 "We show that each 26D open bosonic Regge string scattering amplitude (RSSA) can be expressed in terms of one single Appell function F1 in the Regge limit. This result enables us to derive infinite number of recurrence relations among RSSA at arbitrary mass levels, which are conjectured to be related to the known SL(5,C) dynamical symmetry of F1. In addition, we show that these recurrence relations in the Regge limit can be systematically solved so that all RSSA can be expressed in terms of one amplitude. All these results are dual to high energy symmetries of fixed angle string scattering amplitudes discovered previously [4-8]."



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Friday, August 01, 2014

Expanding Protons

I was talking to a friend, and found out, that he doesn't know about this. I assume he is not alone among physicists. Among non-scientists, this may sound like magic. The reason I turned to physics and not "other" ways of knowing, is that with this method, one can know things, that seem unknowable.

It started in Mexico City, I was at Cinvestav , and after talking with Richard Blankenbecler, I had made my mind to study at the Physics Department of UCSB. I had already studied the experimental work carried out there, for a Summer project with my dear professor Jean Pestieau. The title was something like Vector Dominance Model. J.J. Sakurai had discovered, that one could fit experimental data, by just adjusting one parameter, to find out for instance, that photons and protons behave the same way at high energies. The experimental work done at Santa Barbara was crucial to get these data. Thus, I was game, I showed up at UCSB with my suitcase full of books in September of 1973.

Robert L. Sugar accepted to direct my work there, and asked me to look at the work of T.T. Wu, and Hung Cheng. They had predicted, that proton cross sections, i.e. probability of collision, were going to increase, instead of decrease, as one increases the energy. This paper came out in 1970, in PRL. Sure enough when the data came in, they were right.

This probability keeps growing, experiment after experiment, since then.

Once talking to Arturo Cisneros Stoianowski, he mentioned the reaction of one of his Caltech professors, I think it was Murray Gell-Mann, "I guess at this rate, one day protons will be the size of trucks."

When Wu and Cheng predicted that, another Caltech Professor, Richard Feynman, was very impressed at the tour de force, of these, by then young men.

I was not intimated by these giants of theoretical physics, maybe I should've been, and started working in Professor's Sugar Ph. D. thesis problem.

I am convinced that, not only proton cross sections will keep increasing, but that I have an idea of how it happens.

It has to do with space-time dimension, but I believe, in a different way that the friend I mentioned earlier thinks.

One can think of a proton, as a neat sphere at rest. As two protons approach each other, they are not spheres, but disks, due to Lorentz-FitzGerald contraction. Special Relativity mathematics, without Quantum Mechanics, indicate that the spheres do not change size in the perpendicular direction, of their head-on collision direction.

I believe that Quantum Mechanics, allows the charged cloud around them, to diffuse in  the perpendicular direction through a Brownian Motion of energy.

Voilà, there you have your expanding proton.

How is this related to 3D space?

At very high energies, particles move more, and more, how Feynman envisioned them, in real path trajectories, not clouds. The Quantum Behavior jumps, so to say, to the transversal cloud. The hard three dimensional problem of particle motions, breaks up into two simpler motions, one one-dimensional, and the other two-dimensional.

[hep-ph/9808417] QCD Phase Shifts and Rising Total Cross-Sections

[hep-ph/9808417] QCD Phase Shifts and Rising Total Cross-Sections:



 "Energy dependence of γ∗p total cross section is considered. It is known from the HERA data that the cross section grows with energy, and the rate of growth is an increasing function of the virtuality Q2 of the photon γ∗. This dependence can be explained in a simple and generic way by the Froissart bound. To implement this mechanism quantitatively a theory satisfying s-channel unitarity is required. This is achieved by computing the total cross section from the optical theorem, and the forward elastic amplitude from the phase shifts in the impact-parameter representation. A recipe to do so in perturbative QCD is discussed, together with an expose of the advantage to calculate the elastic amplitude via phase shift, rather than direct sum of all Feynman diagrams. A two-loop computation of phase shift and total cross section is presented, and compared with the HERA data with good agreements."



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Fairy Tale

When my kids were young they made me think hard. I remember one time I was about to conk out, and my daughter demanded another story! I pulled myself together, and I produced one, which I could even reuse, when the boy showed up ten years later.

After telling you this tale, I'll give you another one, fresh from the oven.

There is a curious boy, who heard of a place in the forest, where nobody entering leaves. He decides to experiment, he sends a chicken, a dog, and so on. Yes they do not return. Finally he summons enough courage and goes in.

Once inside, he finds an enchanted forest, where everybody is having such a great time, that nobody wants to leave!

The End.

Now the new one.

In the beginning there was nothing, then, nobody knows how, something appeared. First it was easy to get things done, there were so few constraints. As time passed, space increased, and it was getting harder and harder to get anything done. At a critical point small universes appeared, where things were manageable, making separate worlds.

Ito, Kim, Koizuka, Nishimura, and Tsuchiya, just published their toy universe, which needed a supercomputer to tell the tale.

Among other things, they found out why  we live in a space of width, depth, and height!

Ultra High Energy Cosmic Rays

There is an energy distribution of cosmic rays, a lot of them have low energy and come from nearby, a few have the highest energies, and come from far away. There are strong evidences of high space concentration of these particles. They come from a   region in the Northern Hemisphere, close to the North Star.

This is intriguing.

One conclusion I draw, is that there are natural accelerators in the Universe.

Humans are less creative than we assume sometimes.  In Africa there are natural nuclear reactors, and animal eyes appeared before iPhone cameras.

Matter seems to abhor vacuum, and also it seems to be cozy. Bunched up beams of particles all over the place.

Neat.

Feynman proposed that particles could be studied through their paths, instead of their clouds. Feynman diagrams are useful, the new Amplituhedron seems to vindicate the man from Far Rockaway!

Thursday, July 31, 2014

[1312.2007] The Amplituhedron

[1312.2007] The Amplituhedron:



"Perturbative scattering amplitudes in gauge theories have remarkable simplicity and hidden infinite dimensional symmetries that are completely obscured in the conventional formulation of field theory using Feynman diagrams. This suggests the existence of a new understanding for scattering amplitudes where locality and unitarity do not play a central role but are derived consequences from a different starting point. In this note we provide such an understanding for N=4 SYM scattering amplitudes in the planar limit, which we identify as ``the volume" of a new mathematical object--the Amplituhedron--generalizing the positive Grassmannian. Locality and unitarity emerge hand-in-hand from positive geometry."



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Why is Space 3D?

A friend got me thinking about this basic question, here I write ideas related to it.

There is a perception issue to begin with. If your rooms are not cubes, like most people's, from my city of birth, you may not know what 3D is. Then you have to go to a technical high school like I did, and then you learn everything about vectors, having fun with it, like I did. I still remember explaining to a friend, who was absent that day, these ideas. I was really excited. We had already studied Cartesian Geometry in a previous lesson. All the abstract frame, was in my head, by the time I was a teenager.

Now I am over sixty, and I still don't know, why it is so. I do not feel bad, because nobody does.

Now I know much more, I even  personally met one actor of this narrative. Let me start there:

Manoj Prasad, was a very young, and famous person, when I met him. He discovered, with his professor Michael Sommerfield, what we now call, the Bogomol'nyi-Prasad-Sommerfield monopole. Neat exact solution, to a Non-Abelian field. To this day nobody has seen one of these, in the real world, so far it only exists in our minds.

As it turns out, these exact solutions exist in 3D, and through the magic of the gauge field, involve time as well. We know we live in 3 huge spatial dimensions, and something inside, or prior to us, maybe the so-called strings, has been around during a huge time. To be exact 13.798±0.037 billion years, according to Wikipedia.

Why?

It gets curiouser and curiouser, as Alice in Wonderland says.

Enter Roger Penrose, unfortunately I have not met him personally, but two friends did. One was his contemporary, Jerzy Plebanski, and the other is younger than I, Gerardo Torres del Castillo.

Penrose loved complex variables, like I did. He was studying mathematics in England, and had the insight, that a set of two complex manifolds together, would make a neat mathematical representation, of the four dimensional macroscopic space, we were born in. This proposal goes by the name of Twistor Theory.

To finish this note, I link to the computer calculations done by a Japanese group, as reported a few years back.

You can read about it in Discover Magazine.


[1312.7878] Into the Amplituhedron

[1312.7878] Into the Amplituhedron:



"We initiate an exploration of the physics and geometry of the amplituhedron, starting with the simplest case of the integrand for four-particle scattering in planar N=4 SYM. We show how the textbook structure of the unitarity double-cut follows from the positive geometry. We also use the geometry to expose the behavior of the multicollinear limit, providing a direct motivation for studying the logarithm of the amplitude. In addition to computing the two and three-loop integrands, we explore various lower-dimensional faces of the amplituhedron, thereby computing non-trivial cuts of the integrand to all loop orders."



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[hep-th/9707009] BPS Monopoles

[hep-th/9707009] BPS Monopoles:



"We review classical BPS monopoles, their moduli spaces, twistor descriptions and dynamics. Particular emphasis is placed upon symmetric monopoles, where recent progress has been made. Some remarks on the role of monopoles in S-duality and Seiberg-Witten theory are also made."



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[1210.3382] Generalized BPS magnetic monopoles

[1210.3382] Generalized BPS magnetic monopoles:



"We show the existence of Bogomol'nyi-Prasad-Sommerfield (BPS) magnetic monopoles in a generalized Yang-Mills-Higgs model which is controlled by two positive functions. This effective model, in principle, would describe the dynamics of the nonabelian fields in a chromoelectric media. We check the consistency of our generalized construction by analyzing an explicit case ruled by a real parameter. We also use the well-known spherically symmetric Ansatz to attain the corresponding self-dual equations describing the topological solutions. The overall conclusion is that the new solutions behave around the canonical one, with smaller or greater characteristic length."



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MICZ-Kepler System

C stands for the Mexican physicist Arturo Cisneros Stoianoswki

[0711.1037] Generalizations of MICZ-Kepler system

[0711.1037] Generalizations of MICZ-Kepler system:



"We discuss the generalizations of the MICZ-Kepler system (the system describing the motion of the charged particle in the field of Dirac dyon), to the curved spaces, arbitrary potentials and to the multi-dyon background."



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[1004.4579] Generalized MICZ-Kepler system, duality, polynomial and deformed oscillator algebras

[1004.4579] Generalized MICZ-Kepler system, duality, polynomial and deformed oscillator algebras:



"We present the quadratic algebra of the generalized MICZ-Kepler system in three-dimensional Euclidean space E3 and its dual the four dimensional singular oscillator in four-dimensional Euclidean space E4. We present their realization in terms of a deformed oscillator algebra using the Daskaloyannis construction. The structure constants are in these cases function not only of the Hamiltonian but also of other integrals commuting with all generators of the quadratic algebra. We also present a new algebraic derivation of the energy spectrum of the MICZ-Kepler system on the three sphere S3 using a quadratic algebra. These results point out also that results and explicit formula for structure functions obtained for quadratic, cubic and higher order polynomial algebras in context of two-dimensional superintegrable systems may be applied to superintegrable systems in higher dimensions with and without monopoles."



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[1312.5415] A renormalization group method for studying the early universe in the Lorentzian IIB matrix model

[1312.5415] A renormalization group method for studying the early universe in the Lorentzian IIB matrix model:



"We propose a new method for studying the early universe in the Lorentzian version of the IIB matrix model, which is considered to be a nonperturbative formulation of superstring theory. This method is based on the idea of renormalization group, and it enables us to study the time-evolution of the universe for much longer time than in the previous work, which showed that the SO(9) rotational symmetry is spontaneously broken down to SO(3) after a "critical time". We demonstrate how this method works in a simplified model, which is expected to capture the behaviors of the original model when the space is not so large. In particular, we present clear evidence that the three-dimensional space expands exponentially after the critical time in this simplified model."



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Wednesday, July 30, 2014

U.S. Economy Grew at 4% Rate in Second Quarter, Beating Expectations - NYTimes.com

U.S. Economy Grew at 4% Rate in Second Quarter, Beating Expectations - NYTimes.com:



 "The United States economy rebounded heartily in the spring after a dismal winter, the Commerce Department reported on Wednesday, growing at an annual rate of 4 percent from April through June and surpassing economists’ expectations."



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Tuesday, July 29, 2014

Why Can’t the Banking Industry Solve Its Ethics Problems? - NYTimes.com

Why Can’t the Banking Industry Solve Its Ethics Problems? - NYTimes.com:



 "The financial crisis that nearly brought down the global economy was triggered in no small part by the aggressive culture and spotty ethics within the world’s biggest banks. But after six years and countless efforts to reform finance, the banking scandals never seem to end."



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Monday, July 28, 2014

Ultra-high-energy cosmic ray - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Ultra-high-energy cosmic ray - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia:



"In astroparticle physics, an ultra-high-energy cosmic ray (UHECR) is a cosmic ray particle with a kinetic energy greater than 1018 eV, far beyond both its rest mass and energies typical of other cosmic ray particles."



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