355 research outputs found
Overview. Standing on the Threshold: Food Justice in India
This piece provides a summary of the articles detailing the recent fight for food justice in India. It begins by providing an overview of the state of food and nutrition in India and reflects on the experience to date of the role of the courts in promoting food justice. It goes on to describe some of the ongoing struggles to claim rights and justice, highlighting implementation, capacity, incentive and cultural barriers to realisation. Finally, this article focuses on the enduring and new challenges to attaining food security in India, strong food justice system or not
The Giant Inflaton
We investigate a new mechanism for realizing slow roll inflation in string
theory, based on the dynamics of p anti-D3 branes in a class of mildly warped
flux compactifications. Attracted to the bottom of a warped conifold throat,
the anti-branes then cluster due to a novel mechanism wherein the background
flux polarizes in an attempt to screen them. Once they are sufficiently close,
the M units of flux cause the anti-branes to expand into a fuzzy NS5-brane,
which for rather generic choices of p/M will unwrap around the geometry,
decaying into D3-branes via a classical process. We find that the effective
potential governing this evolution possesses several epochs that can
potentially support slow-roll inflation, provided the process can be arranged
to take place at a high enough energy scale, of about one or two orders of
magnitude below the Planck energy; this scale, however, lies just outside the
bounds of our approximations.Comment: 31 pages, 4 figures, LaTeX. v2: references added, typos fixe
Null Brane Intersections
We study pairs of planar D-branes intersecting on null hypersurfaces, and
other related configurations. These are supersymmetric and have finite energy
density. They provide open-string analogues of the parabolic orbifold and
null-fluxbrane backgrounds for closed superstrings. We derive the spectrum of
open strings, showing in particular that if the D-branes are shifted in a
spectator dimension so that they do not intersect, the open strings joining
them have no asymptotic states. As a result, a single non-BPS excitation can in
this case catalyze a condensation of massless modes, changing significantly the
underlying supersymmetric vacuum state. We argue that a similar phenomenon can
modify the null cosmological singularity of the time-dependent orbifolds. This
is a stringy mechanism, distinct from black-hole formation and other strong
gravitational instabilities, and one that should dominate at weak string
coupling. A by-product of our analysis is a new understanding of the appearance
of 1/4 BPS threshold bound states, at special points in the moduli space of
toroidally-compactified type-II string theory.Comment: Tex file, uses harvmac, 24 pages with 5 figures. Corrected typos and
added references. Final version to appear in JHE
D-terms and D-strings in open string models
We study the Fayet-Iliopoulos (FI) D-terms on D-branes in type II Calabi-Yau
backgrounds. We provide a simple worldsheet proof of the fact that, at tree
level, these terms only couple to scalars in closed string hypermultiplets. At
the one-loop level, the D-terms get corrections only if the gauge group has an
anomalous spectrum, with the anomaly cancelled by a Green-Schwarz mechanism. We
study the local type IIA model of D6-branes at SU(3) angles and show that, as
in field theory, the one-loop correction suffers from a quadratic divergence in
the open string channel. By studying the closed string channel, we show that
this divergence is related to a closed string tadpole, and is cancelled when
the tadpole is cancelled. Next, we study the cosmic strings that arise in the
supersymmetric phases of these systems in light of recent work of Dvali et. al.
In the type IIA intersecting D6-brane examples, we identify the D-term strings
as D4-branes ending on the D6-branes. Finally, we use N=1 dualities to relate
these results to previous work on the FI D-term of heterotic strings.Comment: 29 pages, 5 figures; v2: improved referencin
Dibaryon Spectroscopy
The AdS/CFT correspondence relates dibaryons in superconformal gauge theories
to holomorphic curves in Kaehler-Einstein surfaces. The degree of the
holomorphic curves is proportional to the gauge theory conformal dimension of
the dibaryons. Moreover, the number of holomorphic curves should match, in an
appropriately defined sense, the number of dibaryons. Using AdS/CFT backgrounds
built from the generalized conifolds of Gubser, Shatashvili, and Nekrasov
(1999), we show that the gauge theory prediction for the dimension of
dibaryonic operators does indeed match the degree of the corresponding
holomorphic curves. For AdS/CFT backgrounds built from cones over del Pezzo
surfaces, we are able to match the degree of the curves to the conformal
dimension of dibaryons for the n'th del Pezzo surface, n=1,2,...,6. Also, for
the del Pezzos and the A_k type generalized conifolds, for the dibaryons of
smallest conformal dimension, we are able to match the number of holomorphic
curves with the number of possible dibaryon operators from gauge theory.Comment: 30 pages, 6 figures, corrected refs; v3 typos correcte
Axions In String Theory
In the context of string theory, axions appear to provide the most plausible
solution of the strong CP problem. However, as has been known for a long time,
in many string-based models, the axion coupling parameter F_a is several orders
of magnitude higher than the standard cosmological bounds. We re-examine this
problem in a variety of models, showing that F_a is close to the GUT scale or
above in many models that have GUT-like phenomenology, as well as some that do
not. On the other hand, in some models with Standard Model gauge fields
supported on vanishing cycles, it is possible for F_a to be well below the GUT
scale.Comment: 62 pages, v2; references, acknowledgements and minor corrections
adde
Real-time gauge/gravity duality: Prescription, Renormalization and Examples
We present a comprehensive analysis of the prescription we recently put
forward for the computation of real-time correlation functions using
gauge/gravity duality. The prescription is valid for any holographic
supergravity background and it naturally maps initial and final data in the
bulk to initial and final states or density matrices in the field theory. We
show in detail how the technique of holographic renormalization can be applied
in this setting and we provide numerous illustrative examples, including the
computation of time-ordered, Wightman and retarded 2-point functions in
Poincare and global coordinates, thermal correlators and higher-point
functions.Comment: 85 pages, 13 figures; v2: added comments and reference
Antimetastatic Potential of PAI-1 Specific RNA Aptamers
The serine protease inhibitor plasminogen activator inhibitor-1 (PAI-1) is increased in several cancers, including breast, where it is associated with a poor outcome. Metastatic breast cancer has a dismal prognosis, as evidenced by treatment goals that are no longer curative but are largely palliative in nature. PAI-1 competes with integrins and the urokinase plasminogen activator receptor on the surface of breast cancer cells for binding to vitronectin. This results in the detachment of tumor cells from the extracellular matrix, which is critical to the metastatic process. For this reason, we sought to isolate RNA aptamers that disrupt the interaction between PAI-1 and vitronectin. Through utilization of combinatorial chemistry techniques, aptamers have been selected that bind to PAI-1 with high affinity and specificity. We identified two aptamers, WT-15 and SM-20, that disrupt the interactions between PAI-1 and heparin, as well as PAI-1 and vitronectin, without affecting the antiprotease activity of PAI-1. Furthermore, SM-20 prevented the detachment of breast cancer cells (MDA-MB-231) from vitronectin in the presence of PAI-1, resulting in an increase in cellular adhesion. Therefore, the PAI-1 aptamer SM-20 demonstrates therapeutic potential as an antimetastatic agent and could possibly be used as an adjuvant to traditional chemotherapy for breast cancer.Peer Reviewedhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/78126/1/oli.2008.0177.pd
ASTRO-F - The next generation of mid-infrared surveys
We present basic observational strategies for ASTRO-F (also known as the
Imaging Infra Red Surveyor (IRIS)) to be launched in 2004 by the Japanese
Institute of Space and Astronautical Science (ISAS). We examine 2 survey
scenarios, a deep ~1sq.deg. survey reaching sensitivities an order of magnitude
below than the deepest surveys performed by ISO in the mid-IR, and a shallow
\~18sq.deg mid-infrared (7-25um in 6 bands) covering an area greater than the
entire area covered by all ISO mid-IR surveys. Using 2 cosmological models the
number of galaxies predicted for each survey is calculated. The first model
uses an enhancement of the pure luminosity evolution model of Pearson &
Rowan-Robinson while the new models incorporate a strongly evolving ULIG
component. For the deep survey, between 20,000-30,000 galaxies should be
detected in the shortest wavebands and ~5000 in the longest (25um) band. The
shallow survey would be expected to detect of the order of 100,000 - 150,000
sources.Comment: 17 pages, 13 figures, accepted by MNRA
Toroidal Orientifolds in IIA with General NS-NS Fluxes
Type IIA toroidal orientifolds offer a promising toolkit for model builders,
especially when one includes not only the usual fluxes from NS-NS and R-R field
strengths, but also fluxes that are T-dual to the NS-NS three-form flux. These
new ingredients are known as metric fluxes and non-geometric fluxes, and can
help stabilize moduli or can lead to other new features. In this paper we study
two approaches to these constructions, by effective field theory or by toroidal
fibers twisted over a toroidal base. Each approach leads us to important
observations, in particular the presence of D-terms in the four-dimensional
effective potential in some cases, and a more subtle treatment of the
quantization of the general NS-NS fluxes. Though our methods are general, we
illustrate each approach on the example of an orientifold of T^6/Z_4.Comment: 59 pages, references adde
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