Charged AdS Black Holes and Catastrophic Holography

We compute the properties of a class of charged black holes in anti-de Sitter space-time, in diverse dimensions. These black holes are solutions of consistent Einstein-Maxwell truncations of gauged supergravities, which are shown to arise from the inclusion of rotation in the transverse space. We uncover rich thermodynamic phase structures for these systems, which display classic critical phenomena, including structures isomorphic to the van der Waals-Maxwell liquid-gas system. In that case, the phases are controlled by the universal `cusp' and `swallowtail' shapes familiar from catastrophe theory. All of the thermodynamics is consistent with field theory interpretations via holography, where the dual field theories can sometimes be found on the world volumes of coincident rotating branes.Comment: 19 pages, revtex, psfig, 6 multicomponent figures, typos, references and a few remarks have been repaired, and adde

Reassessing Nuclear South Asia

It has been twelve years since the 1998 nuclear tests in India and Pakistan. Sufficient time has passed to draw some conclusions about the meaning, motivations, and implications of those events. This issue begins with an article which sets the stage for the tests, providing a retrospective on the political climate at the time and the steps each country took toward nuclear weapons development. The issue proceeds with topics focusing on nuclear doctrine, security of the weapons themselves, the implications of the U.S.-India nuclear agreement, and the options for a Fissile Material Cutoff Treaty (FMCT). A timeline of events in South Asia up to August 2009 completes the publication.published or submitted for publicationnot peer reviewe