Dirac eigenvalues and total scalar curvature

It has recently been conjectured that the eigenvalues $\lambda$ of the Dirac operator on a closed Riemannian spin manifold $M$ of dimension $n\ge 3$ can be estimated from below by the total scalar curvature: $$\lambda^2 \ge \frac{n}{4(n-1)} \cdot \frac{\int_M S}{vol(M)}.$$ We show by example that such an estimate is impossible.Comment: 9 pages, LaTeX, uses pstricks macro package. to appear in Journal of Geometry and Physic

Chiral perturbation theory for lattice QCD including O(a^2)

The O(a^2) contributions to the chiral effective Lagrangian for lattice QCD with Wilson fermions are constructed. The results are generalized to partially quenched QCD with Wilson fermions as well as to the "mixed'' lattice theory with Wilson sea quarks and Ginsparg-Wilson valence quarks.Comment: 3 pages, Lattice2003 (spectrum

Prescribing eigenvalues of the Dirac operator

In this note we show that every compact spin manifold of dimension $\geq 3$ can be given a Riemannian metric for which a finite part of the spectrum of the Dirac operator consists of arbitrarily prescribed eigenvalues with multiplicity 1.Comment: To appear in Manuscripta Mathematic

The first conformal Dirac eigenvalue on 2-dimensional tori

Let M be a compact manifold with a spin structure \chi and a Riemannian metric g. Let \lambda_g^2 be the smallest eigenvalue of the square of the Dirac operator with respect to g and \chi. The \tau-invariant is defined as \tau(M,\chi):= sup inf \sqrt{\lambda_g^2} Vol(M,g)^{1/n} where the supremum runs over the set of all conformal classes on M, and where the infimum runs over all metrics in the given class. We show that \tau(T^2,\chi)=2\sqrt{\pi} if \chi is ``the'' non-trivial spin structure on T^2. In order to calculate this invariant, we study the infimum as a function on the spin-conformal moduli space and we show that the infimum converges to 2\sqrt{\pi} at one end of the spin-conformal moduli space.Comment: published version (typos removed, bibliography updated

Upper bounds for the first eigenvalue of the Dirac operator on surfaces

In this paper we will prove new extrinsic upper bounds for the eigenvalues of the Dirac operator on an isometrically immersed surface $M^2 \hookrightarrow {\Bbb R}^3$ as well as intrinsic bounds for 2-dimensional compact manifolds of genus zero and genus one. Moreover, we compare the different estimates of the eigenvalue of the Dirac operator for special families of metrics.Comment: Latex2.09, 23 page

Reentry produced by small-scale heterogeneities in a discrete model of cardiac tissue

Reentries are reexcitations of cardiac tissue after the passing of an excitation wave which can cause dangerous arrhythmias like tachycardia or life-threatening heart failures like fibrillation. The heart is formed by a network of cells connected by gap junctions. Under ischemic conditions some of the cells lose their connections, because gap junctions are blocked and the excitability is decreased. We model a circular region of the tissue where a fraction of connections among individual cells are removed and substituted by non-conducting material in a twodimensional (2D) discrete model of a heterogeneous excitable medium with local kinetics based on electrophysiology. Thus, two neighbouring cells are connected (disconnected) with a probability f (1 - f). Such a region is assumed to be surrounded by homogeneous tissue. The circular heterogeneous area is shown to act as a source of new waves which reenter into the tissue and reexcitate the whole domain. We employ the Fenton-Karma equations to model the action potential for the local kinetics of the discrete nodes to study the statistics of the reentries in two dimensional networks with different topologies. We conclude that the probability of reentry is determined by the proximity of the fraction of disrupted connections between neighboring nodes (Peer ReviewedPostprint (published version

Double poles in Lattice QCD with mixed actions

We consider effects resulting from the use of different discretizations for the valence and the sea quarks, considering Wilson and/or Ginsparg--Wilson fermions. We assume that such effects appear through scaling violations that can be studied using effective-lagrangian techniques. We show that a double pole is present in flavor-neutral Goldstone meson propagators, even if the flavor non-diagonal Goldstone mesons made out of valence or sea quark have equal masses. We then consider some observables known to be anomalously sensitive to the presence of a double pole. We find that the double-pole enhanced scaling violations may turn out to be rather small in practice.Comment: 8 pages; combined writeup of talks given at Lattice 2005 (Dublin) and the Workshop on Computational Hadron Physics (Cyprus

The Dirac spectrum on manifolds with gradient conformal vector fields

We show that the Dirac operator on a spin manifold does not admit $L^2$ eigenspinors provided the metric has a certain asymptotic behaviour and is a warped product near infinity. These conditions on the metric are fulfilled in particular if the manifold is complete and carries a non-complete vector field which outside a compact set is gradient conformal and non-vanishing.Comment: 12 page

On Witten's global anomaly for higher SU(2) representations

The spectral flow of the overlap operator is computed numerically along a particular path in gauge field space. The path connects two gauge equivalent configurations which differ by a gauge transformation in the non-trivial class of pi_4(SU(2)). The computation is done with the SU(2) gauge field in the fundamental, the 3/2, and the 5/2 representation. The number of eigenvalue pairs that change places along this path is established for these three representations and an even-odd pattern predicted by Witten is verified.Comment: 24 pages, 12 eps figure