The fate of Newton's law in brane-world scenarios

We consider brane-world scenarios embedded into string theory. We find that the D-brane backreaction induces a large increase in the open string's proper length. Consequently the stringy nature of elementary particles can be detected at distances much larger than the fundamental string scale. As an example, we compute the gravitational potential between two open strings ending on backreacting D3-branes in four-dimensional compactifications of type II string theory. We find that the Newtonian potential receives a correction that goes like 1/r but that is not proportional to the inertial masses of the open strings, implying a violation of the equivalence principle in the effective gravitational theory. This stringy correction is screened by thermal effects when the distance between the strings is greater than the inverse temperature. This suggests new experimental tests for many phenomenological models in type II string theory.Comment: 8 pages, 3 figure

Bound states in N=2 Liouville theory with boundary and Deep throat D-branes

We exhibit bound states in the spectrum of non-compact D-branes in N=2 Liouville conformal field theory. We interpret these states in the study of D-branes in the near-horizon limit of Neveu-Schwarz five-branes spread on a topologically trivial circle. We match semi-classical di-electric and repulsion effects with exact conformal field theory results and describe the fate of D-branes hitting NS5-branes. We also show that the bound states can give rise to massless vector and hyper multiplets in a low-energy gauge theory on D-branes deep inside the throat.Comment: 45 pages, 11 figures, references added, JHEP versio

Sparsity vs. Statistical Independence in Adaptive Signal Representations: A Case Study of the Spike Process

Finding a basis/coordinate system that can efficiently represent an input data stream by viewing them as realizations of a stochastic process is of tremendous importance in many fields including data compression and computational neuroscience. Two popular measures of such efficiency of a basis are sparsity (measured by the expected $\ell^p$ norm, $0 < p \leq 1$) and statistical independence (measured by the mutual information). Gaining deeper understanding of their intricate relationship, however, remains elusive. Therefore, we chose to study a simple synthetic stochastic process called the spike process, which puts a unit impulse at a random location in an $n$-dimensional vector for each realization. For this process, we obtained the following results: 1) The standard basis is the best both in terms of sparsity and statistical independence if $n \geq 5$ and the search of basis is restricted within all possible orthonormal bases in $R^n$; 2) If we extend our basis search in all possible invertible linear transformations in $R^n$, then the best basis in statistical independence differs from the one in sparsity; 3) In either of the above, the best basis in statistical independence is not unique, and there even exist those which make the inputs completely dense; 4) There is no linear invertible transformation that achieves the true statistical independence for $n > 2$.Comment: 39 pages, 7 figures, submitted to Annals of the Institute of Statistical Mathematic