Small-Scale Structure of Spacetime: Bounds and Conjectures

This review consists of two parts. The first part establishes certain astrophysical bounds on the smoothness of classical spacetime. Some of the best bounds to date are based on the absence of vacuum Cherenkov radiation in ultrahigh-energy cosmic rays. The second part discusses possible implications of these bounds for the quantum structure of spacetime. One conjecture is that the fundamental length scale of quantum spacetime may be different from the Planck length.Comment: 20 pages; invited talk at the Third Mexican Meeting on Mathematical and Experimental Physics, September 10-14, 2007, El Colegio Nacional, Mexico City; v3: final versio

Time delay of light signals in an energy-dependent spacetime metric

In this note we review the problem of time delay of photons propagating in a spacetime with a metric that explicitly depends on the energy of the particles (Gravity-Rainbow approach). We show that corrections due to this approach -- which is closely related to DSR proposal -- produce for small redshifts ($z<<1$) smaller time delays than in the generic Lorentz Invariance Violating case.Comment: 5 pages. This version contains two new references with respect to the published versio

First Stars III Conference Summary

The understanding of the formation, life, and death of Population III stars, as well as the impact that these objects had on later generations of structure formation, is one of the foremost issues in modern cosmological research and has been an active area of research during the past several years. We summarize the results presented at "First Stars III," a conference sponsored by Los Alamos National Laboratory, the Kavli Institute for Particle Astrophysics and Cosmology, and the Joint Institute for Nuclear Astrophysics. This conference, the third in a series, took place in July 2007 at the La Fonda Hotel in Santa Fe, New Mexico, U.S.A.Comment: 11 pages, no figures; Conference summary for First Stars III, which was held in Santa Fe, NM on July 15-20, 2007. To appear in "Proceedings of First Stars III," Eds. Brian W. O'Shea, Alexander Heger & Tom Abe

Meta-stable SUSY Breaking Model in Supergravity

We analyze a supersymmetry (SUSY) breaking model proposed by Intriligator, Seiberg and Shih in a supergravity (SUGRA) framework. This is a simple and natural setup which demands neither extra superpotential interactions nor an additional gauge symmetry. In the SUGRA setup, the U(1)R symmetry is explicitly broken by the constant term in the superpotential, and pseudo-moduli field naturally takes non-zero vacuum expectation value through a vanishing cosmological constant condition. Sfermions tend to be heavier than gauginos, and the strong-coupling scale is determined once a ratio of sfermion to gaugino masses is fixed.Comment: 13 page

Interactive color display of 3-D engineering analysis results

A general approach to three-dimensional postprocessing of engineering analyses is presented. The approach is versatile and may handle the results from a wide range of engineering analysis methods which involve the discretization of continua. To facilitate the understanding of complex three-dimensional numerical models, advanced interactive color postprocessing techniques are introduced. Finite element, finite difference, and boundary element models are evaluated with the prototype postprocessor. The existing color graphics program (POSTPRO3D) was ported to a high-resolution device. Interactive graphic tools were implemented to facilitate qualitative mesh evaluation from a single analysis. A postprocessing environment was design for workstation technology

String Thermodynamics in D-Brane Backgrounds

We discuss the thermal properties of string gases propagating in various D-brane backgrounds in the weak-coupling limit, and at temperatures close to the Hagedorn temperature. We determine, in the canonical ensemble, whether the Hagedorn temperature is limiting or non-limiting. This depends on the dimensionality of the D-brane, and the size of the compact dimensions. We find that in many cases the non-limiting behaviour manifest in the canonical ensemble is modified to a limiting behaviour in the microcanonical ensemble and show that, when there are different systems in thermal contact, the energy flows into open strings on the `limiting' D-branes of largest dimensionality. Such energy densities may eventually exceed the D-brane intrinsic tension. We discuss possible implications of this for the survival of Dp-branes with large values of p in an early cosmological Hagedorn regime. We also discuss the general phase diagram of the interacting theory, as implied by the holographic and black-hole/string correspondence principles.Comment: 50 pages, LaTeX, 4 eps figures. Added discussion of random walk picture. Corrected technical error in the treatment of ND strings (notice some formulas are rewritten). Conclusions unchange

Random Antiferromagnetic SU(N) Spin Chains

We analyze random isotropic antiferromagnetic SU(N) spin chains using the real space renormalization group. We find that they are governed at low energies by a universal infinite randomness fixed point different from the one of random spin-1/2 chains. We determine analytically the important exponents: the energy-length scale relation is $\Omega\sim\exp(-L^{\psi})$, where $\psi=1/N$, and the mean correlation function is given by $\bar{C_{ij}}\sim(-1)^{i-j}/|i-j|^{\phi}$, where $\phi=4/N$. Our analysis shows that the infinite-N limit is unable to capture the behavior obtained at any finite N.Comment: 4 pages, 3 figure

Some Thermodynamical Aspects of String Theory

Thermodynamical aspects of string theory are reviewed and discussed.Comment: 22 Pages plain latex; based on contributions to Golfand Memorial Volume and Englertfest by E.Rabinovic