On Two Kinds of Differential Operators on General Smooth Surfaces

Two kinds of differential operators that can be generally defined on an arbitrary smooth surface in a finite dimensional Euclid space are studied, one is termed as surface gradient and the other one as Levi-Civita gradient. The surface gradient operator is originated from the differentiability of a tensor field defined on the surface. Some integral and differential identities have been theoretically studied that play the important role in the studies on continuous mediums whose geometrical configurations can be taken as surfaces and on interactions between fluids and deformable boundaries. The definition of Levi-Civita gradient is based on Levi-Civita connections generally defined on Riemann manifolds. It can be used to set up some differential identities in the intrinsic/coordiantes-independent form that play the essential role in the theory of vorticity dynamics for two dimensional flows on general fixed smooth surfaces

Pseudo-factorials, elliptic functions, and continued fractions

This study presents miscellaneous properties of pseudo-factorials, which are numbers whose recurrence relation is a twisted form of that of usual factorials. These numbers are associated with special elliptic functions, most notably, a Dixonian and a Weierstrass function, which parametrize the Fermat cubic curve and are relative to a hexagonal lattice. A continued fraction expansion of the ordinary generating function of pseudo-factorials, first discovered empirically, is established here. This article also provides a characterization of the associated orthogonal polynomials, which appear to form a new family of "elliptic polynomials", as well as various other properties of pseudo-factorials, including a hexagonal lattice sum expression and elementary congruences.Comment: 24 pages; with correction of typos and minor revision. To appear in The Ramanujan Journa

A Numerical Unitarity Formalism for Evaluating One-Loop Amplitudes

Recent progress in unitarity techniques for one-loop scattering amplitudes makes a numerical implementation of this method possible. We present a 4-dimensional unitarity method for calculating the cut-constructible part of amplitudes and implement the method in a numerical procedure. Our technique can be applied to any one-loop scattering amplitude and offers the possibility that one-loop calculations can be performed in an automatic fashion, as tree-level amplitudes are currently done. Instead of individual Feynman diagrams, the ingredients for our one-loop evaluation are tree-level amplitudes, which are often already known. To study the practicality of this method we evaluate the cut-constructible part of the 4, 5 and 6 gluon one-loop amplitudes numerically, using the analytically known 4, 5 and 6 gluon tree-level amplitudes. Comparisons with analytic answers are performed to ascertain the numerical accuracy of the method.Comment: 29 pages with 8 figures; references updated in rsponse to readers' suggestion