Heavy Hadrons and QCD Instantons

Heavy hadrons are analyzed in a random and dilute gas of instantons. We derive the instanton-induced interactions between heavy and light quarks at next to leading order in the heavy quark mass and in the planar approximation, and discuss their effects on the hadronic spectrum. The role of these interactions in the formation of exotic hadrons is also discussed.Comment: 26 pages, REVTeX, 2 tables, 5 figures, uses FEYNMAN.st

The dynamics of Machiavellian intelligence

The "Machiavellian intelligence" hypothesis (or the "social brain" hypothesis) posits that large brains and distinctive cognitive abilities of humans have evolved via intense social competition in which social competitors developed increasingly sophisticated "Machiavellian" strategies as a means to achieve higher social and reproductive success. Here we build a mathematical model aiming to explore this hypothesis. In the model, genes control brains which invent and learn strategies (memes) which are used by males to gain advantage in competition for mates. We show that the dynamics of intelligence has three distinct phases. During the dormant phase only newly invented memes are present in the population. During the cognitive explosion phase the population's meme count and the learning ability, cerebral capacity (controlling the number of different memes that the brain can learn and use), and Machiavellian fitness of individuals increase in a runaway fashion. During the saturation phase natural selection resulting from the costs of having large brains checks further increases in cognitive abilities. Overall, our results suggest that the mechanisms underlying the "Machiavellian intelligence" hypothesis can indeed result in the evolution of significant cognitive abilities on the time scale of 10 to 20 thousand generations. We show that cerebral capacity evolves faster and to a larger degree than learning ability. Our model suggests that there may be a tendency toward a reduction in cognitive abilities (driven by the costs of having a large brain) as the reproductive advantage of having a large brain decreases and the exposure to memes increases in modern societies.Comment: A revised version has been published by PNA

Dynamics and Decay of Heavy-Light Hadrons

Recent signals for narrow hadrons containing heavy and light flavours are compared with quark model predictions for spectroscopy, strong decays, and radiative transitions. In particular, the production and identification of excited charmed and cs states are examined with emphasis on elucidating the nature of $0^+$ and $1^+$ states. Roughly 200 strong decay amplitudes of $D$ and $D_s$ states up to 3.3 GeV are presented. Applications include determining flavour content in $\eta$ mesons and the mixing angle in $P$ and $D$ wave states and probes of putative molecular states. We advocate searching for radially excited $D_s^*$ states in B decays.Comment: 19 pages, 7 figures, revtex. A numerical error is corrected. Some strong decay rates have change

Impact of generalized benefit functions on the evolution of cooperation in spatial public goods games with continuous strategies

Cooperation and defection may be considered as two extreme responses to a social dilemma. Yet the reality is much less clear-cut. Between the two extremes lies an interval of ambivalent choices, which may be captured theoretically by means of continuous strategies defining the extent of the contributions of each individual player to the common pool. If strategies are chosen from the unit interval, where 0 corresponds to pure defection and 1 corresponds to the maximal contribution, the question is what is the characteristic level of individual investments to the common pool that emerges if the evolution is guided by different benefit functions. Here we consider the steepness and the threshold as two parameters defining an array of generalized benefit functions, and we show that in a structured population there exist intermediate values of both at which the collective contributions are maximal. However, as the cost-to-benefit ratio of cooperation increases the characteristic threshold decreases, while the corresponding steepness increases. Our observations remain valid if more complex sigmoid functions are used, thus reenforcing the importance of carefully adjusted benefits for high levels of public cooperation.Comment: 8 two-column pages, 8 figures; accepted for publication in Physical Review

Anomalous Chiral Fermi Surface

We provide a geometrical argument for the emergence of a Wess-Zumino-Witten (WZW) term for a Fermi surface threaded by a Berry curvature. In the presence of external fields, the gauged WZW term yields a chiral (triangle) anomaly for the fermionic current at the edge of the Fermi surface. Fermion number is conserved though since the Berry curvatures occur always in pairs with opposite (monopole) charge. The anomalous vector and axial currents for a a fermionic fluid at low temperature threaded by pairs of Berry curvatures are discussed. The leading temperature correction to the chiral vortical effect in a slowly rotating Fermi surface threaded by a Berry curvature maybe tied to the gravitational anomaly.Comment: 4 pages; version to appear in PR

The pace of evolution across fitness valleys

How fast does a population evolve from one fitness peak to another? We study the dynamics of evolving, asexually reproducing populations in which a certain number of mutations jointly confer a fitness advantage. We consider the time until a population has evolved from one fitness peak to another one with a higher fitness. The order of mutations can either be fixed or random. If the order of mutations is fixed, then the population follows a metaphorical ridge, a single path. If the order of mutations is arbitrary, then there are many ways to evolve to the higher fitness state. We address the time required for fixation in such scenarios and study how it is affected by the order of mutations, the population size, the fitness values and the mutation rate