Gauge/String Duality in Confining Theories

This is the content of a set of lectures given at the XIII Jorge Andre Swieca Summer School on Particles and Fields, held in Campos do Jordao, Brazil in January 2005. They intend to be a basic introduction to the topic of gauge/gravity duality in confining theories. We start by reviewing some key aspects of the low energy physics of non-Abelian gauge theories. Then, we present the basics of the AdS/CFT correspondence and its extension both to gauge theories in different spacetime dimensions with sixteen supercharges and to more realistic situations with less supersymmetry. We discuss the different options of interest: placing D-branes at singularities and wrapping D-branes in calibrated cycles of special holonomy manifolds. We finally present an outline of a number of non-perturbative phenomena in non-Abelian gauge theories as seen from supergravity.Comment: 70 pages, 8 figures, Lectures given at XIII Jorge Andre Swieca Summer School on Particle and Fields, Campos do Jordao, Brazil, January 2005; v2: several explanations were expanded and improved while an oversight, some typos and the list of references were corrected; v3: minor amendments and a few references added; v4: citations added, final versio

Southern insights on the orient and western orientalisms

This is not another critique of Edward Said’s Orientalism. We know that there is still some space for further discussion on this matter and that there are still people wanting to engage with it, but this is not our concern here. Nevertheless, the term has become inescapable for people like us, researching into and teaching on Arab and Islamic contexts and topics – and even more so when our strategic location is constantly under surveillance in times of Islamophobia and Islamophilia, wary eyes asking if we are with Muslims or against them, or, in a more sophisticated way, with good Muslims or their evil twins, bad Muslims (Mamdani 2004). Strangely, and dangerously, our position regarding Islam – as a monolithic and petrified religion – is presumed to be part of our own academic identity. Said’s book or – as he wrote among other, very insightful things – his metabook – is timeless, both for good and for the wrong reasons. Here, however, we will be using the word ‘Orientalism’ in a narrow sense, referring to the production of humanities and social and cultural sciences on Arab and Islamic contexts and topics and, simply, discarding the nihilistic upshot of some post-Orientalist debates, assuming the political dimension of our researches and outputs. After all, and as Mitchell, appropriately out, Said’s main (and often misunderstood) simple question addressed in Orientalism was ‘How does one know the things that exist?’ and ‘To what extent are the “things that exist” constituted by the knower?’ (Mitchell 2003, referring to Said, 1978: 5). And even if he was neither the first to address this nor, for sure, the last, we need to state it for the sake of transparency and, ultimately and paradoxically, for the sake of science.This article was funded by FCT - Fundação para a Ciência e a Tecnologia within the scope of the Project UID/ANT/04038/201

Ancient genetic landscape of archaeological human remains from Panama, South America and Oceania described through STR genotype frequencies and mitochondrial DNA sequences

The settlements of the Americas and Oceania are particularly fascinating topics. On the one side is the settlements of Australia and New Guinea (30,000 – 50,000 years ago) were the scenarios of one of the earliest migration events carried out by modern humans after left Africa, while Polynesia around 3,000 years ago was the stage of the last major colonization event. Regarding America, despite broad agreement that the Americas were initially populated via Bering, during the Upper Pleistocene 14,600 years ago, it is still a topic controversial, mysterious, shifting, and continuously conflictive as the Ice Age archaeology of the Americas, since, the dates and routes of the peopling of the Americas remain unresolved. Thus, ancient DNA studies on archaeological human remains from Oceania and America are useful to explore the genetic history of these human groups. Given that Near Oceania colonization was the endpoint of one of the earliest Out-of-Africa migrations about 50,000 years ago, and the islands of East Polynesia were the last region of the world to be colonized by humans approximately 1,000 years ago. Whilst, in America, one of the most contentious issues is whether the settlement occurred by means of a single migration or migration streams of migrations from Siberia. Because the gene flow is an important mechanism that contributes to genetic diversity among populations, the presence or absence of certain haplogroups changes the distribution of genetic diversity within populations. Thus, to understand the population dynamics of Oceanians and American peoples before European contact, it was necessary to describe the grade of nuclear and mitochondrial DNA genetic variation. One hundred twenty-five paleo-anthropological remains were analysed via genotyping of six short tandem repeats (STR) markers (nuclear DNA). Moreover, the genetic variation, inferences of demographic histories and clustering trends of these samples were evaluated through the hypervariable segment I (HVSI) of mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA). 35% of the archaeological remains analysed were genotyped successfully. Mitochondrial genetic diversity observed in Oceanian, South American and Panamanian samples reflected the genetic drift effects on these individuals through the founder effect, which happened during Upper Pleistocene when the modern humans reached these regions for the first time. The inferences of historical demographic patterns suggest that ancient individuals from Oceania went through population expansion about 37,972 years ago, which is consistent with the initial colonization of Melanesia. Whilst, ancient individuals from South America and Panama went through population expansions about 14,150 and 9,468 years ago, respectively, correspond to the initial settlement of America during the Upper Pleistocene. The clustering patterns showed that ancient individuals from Bismark Archipelago and Papua New Guinea, and the ancient individuals from New Zealand and Samoa exhibited greater affinity with each other. The cluster branch of America exhibited genetic affinities between ancient Panamanian and South American samples, probably resulted from a migratory event, along the Pacific North Coast, from North America to South America that took place between the Middle and the Upper Holocene.2021-12-2

On the Edge or ‘When Sexualities and Gender Identities Modernise: Paraguayans and Brazilians at the Border Between Foz Do Iguaçu and Ciudad del Este’

Dissertação apresentada ao Programa de Pós-Graduação Relações Internacionais da Universidade Federal da Integração Latino-Americana, como requisito parcial à obtenção do título de Mestra em Relações Internacionais.The story I try to tell here concerns my experience and the experiences of sexual and gender non-conforming individuals who live in the border region between Foz do Iguaçu (Brazil) and Ciudad del Este (CDE, Paraguay). Through personal reports and information collected from Paraguayans and Brazilians by semi-structured interviews, I sought to show, first, how their discourses displayed both an idea of hierarchical relationships regarding a fictive scale of modernity linked to development, which used diverse sexualities and gender identities as a measure of progress. Then, I also sought to portray how their crossings displayed an understanding of borders that was at the same time restrictive but carried in its essence the potential to deterritorialise the rigid modern political logics of separation, difference and national development based on the idea of an unrestrained acceptance towards sexual and gender diversities. In general, I could notice that these people used the border not only for trivial activities but also used it as a way to express their sexuality and gender identities, mainly on the Brazilian side. The goal of this research was to question what does the pendular mobility of sexual and gender non-conforming Paraguayans and Brazilians between Foz do Iguaçu and CDE and the modern discourse of development through the acceptance of diversity, represented for the continuity of the logic of subjective and physical boundaries. I argued that, while the international pendulum mobility of Paraguayan and Brazilian individuals has the potential to challenge and blur the established limits of the state logic of borders, to reveal an immanent space of possibilities; such mobility, however, also carries with it the reinforcement of that same logic, by reproducing a “modern discourse on diversity”.Coordenação de Aperfeiçoamento de Pessoal de Nível Superio

A Brillouin torus decomposition for Chern insulators

Two-band Chern insulators are topologically classified by the Chern number, $c$, which is given by the integral of the Berry curvature of the occupied band over the Brillouin torus. The curvature itself comes from the imaginary part of a more basic object, the quantum geometric tensor, $Q$. On the other hand, the integral over the Brillouin torus of the real part of $Q$ gives rise to another magnitude, the quantum volume, $v_{g}$, that like $c$ also changes abruptly when the system undergoes a topological phase transition. Recently, the information about the topology of the system contained in the quantum volume has been investigated. In this paper we present new results regarding the underlying geometric structure of two-band Chern insulators. Since a generic model describing the system can be characterized by a map, the classifying map, from the Brillouin torus to the two-sphere, we study its properties at the geometric level. We present a procedure for splitting the Brillouin torus into different sectors in such a way that the classifying map when restricted to each of them is an injective immersion. By doing so, we show that $c$ and $v_{g}$ have a very rich inner structure, meaning that they are composed by different contributions that behave differently at the topological phase transition. In particular, some specific regions are found to be ones responsible for the non vanishing value of the topological invariant $c$. In addition, the present work makes contact with, and clarifies, some interpretations of the quantum volume in terms of the Euler characteristic number that were done in the recent literature. We illustrate our findings by a careful analysis of some selected models for Chern insulators corresponding to tight-binding Hamiltonians

European Economies in the First Epoch of Imperialism and Mercantilism. 1415-1846.

The costs and benefits of European Imperialism from the conquest of Ceuta, 1415, to the Treaty of Lusaka, 1974.Twelfth International Economic History Congress. Madrid, 1998.Patrick K. O'Brien and Leandro Prados de la Escosura (eds.)Editada en la Fundación Empresa PúblicaJorge M. Pedreira. «To Have and To Have not». The Economic Consequences of Empire: Portugal (1415-1822).-- Bartolomé Yun-Casalilla. The American Empire and the Spanish Economy: An Institutional and Regional Perspective.-- Pieter C. Emmer. The Economic Impact of the Dutch Expansion Overseas, 1570-1870.-- Paul Butel and François Crouzet. Empire and Economic Growth: the Case of 18th Century France.-- Stanley L. Engerman. British Imperialism in a Mercantilist Age, 1492-1849: Conceptual Issues and Empirical Problems.Publicad

The Fifteenth Marcel Grossmann Meeting

The three volumes of the proceedings of MG15 give a broad view of all aspects of gravitational physics and astrophysics, from mathematical issues to recent observations and experiments. The scientific program of the meeting included 40 morning plenary talks over 6 days, 5 evening popular talks and nearly 100 parallel sessions on 71 topics spread over 4 afternoons. These proceedings are a representative sample of the very many oral and poster presentations made at the meeting.Part A contains plenary and review articles and the contributions from some parallel sessions, while Parts B and C consist of those from the remaining parallel sessions. The contents range from the mathematical foundations of classical and quantum gravitational theories including recent developments in string theory, to precision tests of general relativity including progress towards the detection of gravitational waves, and from supernova cosmology to relativistic astrophysics, including topics such as gamma ray bursts, black hole physics both in our galaxy and in active galactic nuclei in other galaxies, and neutron star, pulsar and white dwarf astrophysics. Parallel sessions touch on dark matter, neutrinos, X-ray sources, astrophysical black holes, neutron stars, white dwarfs, binary systems, radiative transfer, accretion disks, quasars, gamma ray bursts, supernovas, alternative gravitational theories, perturbations of collapsed objects, analog models, black hole thermodynamics, numerical relativity, gravitational lensing, large scale structure, observational cosmology, early universe models and cosmic microwave background anisotropies, inhomogeneous cosmology, inflation, global structure, singularities, chaos, Einstein-Maxwell systems, wormholes, exact solutions of Einstein's equations, gravitational waves, gravitational wave detectors and data analysis, precision gravitational measurements, quantum gravity and loop quantum gravity, quantum cosmology, strings and branes, self-gravitating systems, gamma ray astronomy, cosmic rays and the history of general relativity

Critical Market Crashes

This review is a partial synthesis of the book ``Why stock market crash'' (Princeton University Press, January 2003), which presents a general theory of financial crashes and of stock market instabilities that his co-workers and the author have developed over the past seven years. The study of the frequency distribution of drawdowns, or runs of successive losses shows that large financial crashes are ``outliers'': they form a class of their own as can be seen from their statistical signatures. If large financial crashes are ``outliers'', they are special and thus require a special explanation, a specific model, a theory of their own. In addition, their special properties may perhaps be used for their prediction. The main mechanisms leading to positive feedbacks, i.e., self-reinforcement, such as imitative behavior and herding between investors are reviewed with many references provided to the relevant literature outside the confine of Physics. Positive feedbacks provide the fuel for the development of speculative bubbles, preparing the instability for a major crash. We demonstrate several detailed mathematical models of speculative bubbles and crashes. The most important message is the discovery of robust and universal signatures of the approach to crashes. These precursory patterns have been documented for essentially all crashes on developed as well as emergent stock markets, on currency markets, on company stocks, and so on. The concept of an ``anti-bubble'' is also summarized, with two forward predictions on the Japanese stock market starting in 1999 and on the USA stock market still running. We conclude by presenting our view of the organization of financial markets.Comment: Latex 89 pages and 38 figures, in press in Physics Report

The Ticker, February 29, 2016

The Ticker is the student newspaper of Baruch College. It has been published continuously since 1932, when the Baruch College campus was the School of Business and Civic Administration of the City College of New York