The First Stars: Final Remarks

How did star formation begin in the universe? Some of the questions addressed at this first meeting on "The First Stars" are summarized here from a theoretical perspective, and some brief comments are made on what we may have learned so far.Comment: 5 pages, text only, contains final remarks made at the ESO/MPA conference on "The First Stars", Garching, August 1999; to be published by ES

On the moduli description of local models for ramified unitary groups

Local models are schemes which are intended to model the \'etale-local structure of p-adic integral models of Shimura varieties. Pappas and Zhu have recently given a general group-theoretic construction of flat local models with parahoric level structure for any tamely ramified group, but it remains an interesting problem to characterize the local models, when possible, in terms of an explicit moduli problem. In the setting of local models for ramified, quasi-split GU_n, work towards an explicit moduli description was initiated in the general framework of Rapoport and Zink's book and was subsequently advanced by Pappas and Pappas-Rapoport. In this paper we propose a further refinement to their moduli problem, which we show is both necessary and sufficient to characterize the (flat) local model in a certain special maximal parahoric case with signature (n-1,1).Comment: New section 5.3 giving an explicit application to Shimura varieties, and other minor revisions. To appear in IMRN. 29 page

Reevaluation of the density dependence of nucleon radius and mass in the global color symmetry model of QCD

With the global color symmetry model (GCM) at finite chemical potential, the density dependence of the bag constant, the total energy and the radius of a nucleon in nuclear matter is investigated. A relation between the nuclear matter density and the chemical potential with the action of QCD being taken into account is obtained. A maximal nuclear matter density for the existence of the bag with three quarks confined within is given. The calculated results indicate that, before the maximal density is reached, the bag constant and the total energy of a nucleon decrease, and the radius of a nucleon increases slowly, with the increasing of the nuclear matter density. As the maximal nuclear matter density is reached, the mass of the nucleon vanishes and the radius becomes infinite suddenly. It manifests that a phase transition from nucleons to quarks takes place.Comment: 18 pages, 3 figure

Density Dependence of Nucleon Bag Constant, Radius and Mass in an Effective Field Theory Model of QCD

With the global color symmetry model (GCM) being extended to finite chemical potential, the density dependence of the bag constant, the total energy and the radius of a nucleon, as well as the quark condensate in nuclear matter are investigated. A maximal nuclear matter density for the existence of the bag with three quarks confined within is obtained. The calculated results indicate that, before the maximal density is reached, the bag constant, the total energy of a nucleon and the quark condensate decrease gradually, and the radius of a nucleon increases, with the increasing of the nuclear matter density. Nevertheless no sudden change emerges. As the maximal nuclear matter density is reached, a phase transition from nucleons to quarks takes place and the chiral symmetry is restored.Comment: Latex, 15 postscript pages, 6 postscript files, To be published in Nuclear Physics

HKT Geometry and Fake Five Dimensional Supergravity

Recent results on the relation between hyper-Kahler geometry with torsion and solutions admitting Killing spinors in minimal de sitter supergravity are extended to more general supergravity models with vector multiplets.Comment: 14 pages, latex. Minor typos corrected, references adde

Asymptotic silence-breaking singularities

We discuss three complementary aspects of scalar curvature singularities: asymptotic causal properties, asymptotic Ricci and Weyl curvature, and asymptotic spatial properties. We divide scalar curvature singularities into two classes: so-called asymptotically silent singularities and non-generic singularities that break asymptotic silence. The emphasis in this paper is on the latter class which have not been previously discussed. We illustrate the above aspects and concepts by describing the singularities of a number of representative explicit perfect fluid solutions.Comment: 25 pages, 6 figure