Monetary policy and economic activity: a postwar review

Monetary policy ; Financial markets ; Economic conditions

From Earth to Orbit: An assessment of transportation options

The report assesses the requirements, benefits, technological feasibility, and roles of Earth-to-Orbit transportation systems and options that could be developed in support of future national space programs. Transportation requirements, including those for Mission-to-Planet Earth, Space Station Freedom assembly and operation, human exploration of space, space science missions, and other major civil space missions are examined. These requirements are compared with existing, planned, and potential launch capabilities, including expendable launch vehicles (ELV's), the Space Shuttle, the National Launch System (NLS), and new launch options. In addition, the report examines propulsion systems in the context of various launch vehicles. These include the Advanced Solid Rocket Motor (ASRM), the Redesigned Solid Rocket Motor (RSRM), the Solid Rocket Motor Upgrade (SRMU), the Space Shuttle Main Engine (SSME), the Space Transportation Main Engine (STME), existing expendable launch vehicle engines, and liquid-oxygen/hydrocarbon engines. Consideration is given to systems that have been proposed to accomplish the national interests in relatively cost effective ways, with the recognition that safety and reliability contribute to cost-effectiveness. Related resources, including technology, propulsion test facilities, and manufacturing capabilities are also discussed

On the Back Reaction Problem for Gravitational Perturbations

We derive the effective energy-momentum tensor for cosmological perturbations and prove its gauge-invariance. The result is applied to study the influence of perturbations on the behaviour of the Friedmann background in inflationary Universe scenarios. We found that the back reaction of cosmological perturbations on the background can become important already at energies below the self-reproduction scale.Comment: 4 pages, uses LATE

The AdS/CFT Correspondence and a New Positive Energy Conjecture for General Relativity

We examine the AdS/CFT correspondence when the gauge theory is considered on a compactified space with supersymmetry breaking boundary conditions. We find that the corresponding supergravity solution has a negative energy, in agreement with the expected negative Casimir energy in the field theory. Stability of the gauge theory would imply that this supergravity solution has minimum energy among all solutions with the same boundary conditions. Hence we are lead to conjecture a new positive energy theorem for asymptotically locally Anti-de Sitter spacetimes. We show that the candidate minimum energy solution is stable against all quadratic fluctuations of the metric.Comment: 25 pages, harvma

The Energy-Momentum Tensor for Cosmological Perturbations

We study the effective energy-momentum tensor (EMT) for cosmological perturbations and formulate the gravitational back-reaction problem in a gauge invariant manner. We analyze the explicit expressions for the EMT in the cases of scalar metric fluctuations and of gravitational waves and derive the resulting equations of state. The formalism is applied to investigate the back-reaction effects in chaotic inflation. We find that for long wavelength scalar and tensor perturbations, the effective energy density is negative and thus counteracts any pre-existing cosmological constant. For scalar perturbations during an epoch of inflation, the equation of state is de Sitter-like.Comment: 29 pages, LaTex; to appear in Phys. Rev.

Taub--NUT Dyons in Heterotic String Theory

Starting with the Taub--NUT solution to Einstein's equations, together with a constant dilaton, a dyonic Taub--NUT solution of low energy heterotic string theory with non--trivial dilaton, axion and $U(1)$ gauge fields is constructed by employing $O(1,1)$ transformations. The electromagnetic dual of this solution is constructed, using SL(2,\rline) transformations. By an appropriate change to scaled variables, the extremal limit of the dual solution is shown to correspond to the low energy limit of an exact conformal field theory presented previously.Comment: 16 pages (plain TEX), (Revised version has curvature singularities correctly identified), IASSNS-HEP-94/50, McGill/94-2

Pathologies in Asymptotically Lifshitz Spacetimes

There has been significant interest in the last several years in studying possible gravitational duals, known as Lifshitz spacetimes, to anisotropically scaling field theories by adding matter to distort the asymptotics of an AdS spacetime. We point out that putative ground state for the most heavily studied example of such a spacetime, that with a flat spatial section, suffers from a naked singularity and further point out this singularity is not resolvable by any known stringy effect. We review the reasons one might worry that asymptotically Lifshitz spacetimes are unstable and employ the initial data problem to study the stability of such systems. Rather surprisingly this question, and even the initial value problem itself, for these spacetimes turns out to generically not be well-posed. A generic normalizable state will evolve in such a way to violate Lifshitz asymptotics in finite time. Conversely, enforcing the desired asymptotics at all times puts strong restrictions not just on the metric and fields in the asymptotic region but in the deep interior as well. Generically, even perturbations of the matter field of compact support are not compatible with the desired asymptotics.Comment: 36 pages, 1 figure, v2: Enhanced discussion of singularity, including relationship to Gubser's conjecture and singularity in RG flow solution, plus minor clarification

Back Reaction And Local Cosmological Expansion Rate

We calculate the back reaction of cosmological perturbations on a general relativistic variable which measures the local expansion rate of the Universe. Specifically, we consider a cosmological model in which matter is described by a single field. We analyze back reaction both in a matter dominated Universe and in a phase of scalar field-driven chaotic inflation. In both cases, we find that the leading infrared terms contributing to the back reaction vanish when the local expansion rate is measured at a fixed value of the matter field which is used as a clock, whereas they do not appear to vanish if the expansion rate is evaluated at a fixed value of the background time. We discuss possible implications for more realistic models with a more complicated matter sector.Comment: 7 pages, No figure

Can the Acceleration of Our Universe Be Explained by the Effects of Inhomogeneities?

No. It is simply not plausible that cosmic acceleration could arise within the context of general relativity from a back-reaction effect of inhomogeneities in our universe, without the presence of a cosmological constant or ``dark energy.'' We point out that our universe appears to be described very accurately on all scales by a Newtonianly perturbed FLRW metric. (This assertion is entirely consistent with the fact that we commonly encounter $\delta \rho/\rho > 10^{30}$.) If the universe is accurately described by a Newtonianly perturbed FLRW metric, then the back-reaction of inhomogeneities on the dynamics of the universe is negligible. If not, then it is the burden of an alternative model to account for the observed properties of our universe. We emphasize with concrete examples that it is {\it not} adequate to attempt to justify a model by merely showing that some spatially averaged quantities behave the same way as in FLRW models with acceleration. A quantity representing the ``scale factor'' may ``accelerate'' without there being any physically observable consequences of this acceleration. It also is {\it not} adequate to calculate the second-order stress energy tensor and show that it has a form similar to that of a cosmological constant of the appropriate magnitude. The second-order stress energy tensor is gauge dependent, and if it were large, contributions of higher perturbative order could not be neglected. We attempt to clear up the apparent confusion between the second-order stress energy tensor arising in perturbation theory and the ``effective stress energy tensor'' arising in the ``shortwave approximation.''Comment: 20 pages, 1 figure, several footnotes and references added, version accepted for publication in CQG;some clarifying comments adde

Large N Phases, Gravitational Instantons and the Nuts and Bolts of AdS Holography

Recent results in the literature concerning holography indicate that the thermodynamics of quantum gravity (at least with a negative cosmological constant) can be modeled by the large N thermodynamics of quantum field theory. We emphasize that this suggests a completely unitary evolution of processes in quantum gravity, including black hole formation and decay; and even more extreme examples involving topology change. As concrete examples which show that this correspondence holds even when the space-time is only locally asymptotically AdS, we compute the thermodynamical phase structure of the AdS-Taub-NUT and AdS-Taub-Bolt spacetimes, and compare them to a 2+1 dimensional conformal field theory (at large N) compactified on a squashed three sphere, and on the twisted plane.Comment: 20 pages, three figures. (uses harvmac.tex and epsf.tex