The Measure of Cosmological Parameters

New, large, ground and space telescopes are contributing to an exciting and rapid period of growth in observational cosmology. The subject is now far from its earlier days of being data-starved and unconstrained, and new data are fueling a healthy interplay between observations and experiment and theory. I briefly review here the status of measurements of a number of quantities of interest in cosmology: the Hubble constant, the total mass-energy density, the matter density, the cosmological constant or dark energy component, and the total optical background light.Comment: 12 pages, 4 figures, to be published in "2001: A Spacetime Odyssey: Proceedings of the Inaugural Conference of the Michigan Center for Theoretical Physics", Michael J. Duff & James T. Liu, eds., (World Scientific, Singapore), in pres

Decomposing the Sources of Earnings Inequality: Assessing the Role of Reallocation

This paper exploits longitudinal employer-employee matched data from the U.S. Census Bureau to investigate the contribution of worker and firm reallocation to changes in earnings inequality within and across industries between 1992 and 2003. We find that factors that cannot be measured using standard cross-sectional data, including the entry and exit of firms and the sorting of workers across firms, are important sources of changes in earnings distributions over time. Our results also suggest that the dynamics driving changes in earnings inequality are heterogeneous across industries.inequality, linked employer-employee data, sorting

Note on graviton MHV amplitudes

Two new formulas which express n-graviton MHV tree amplitudes in terms of sums of squares of n-gluon amplitudes are discussed. The first formula is derived from recursion relations. The second formula, simpler because it involves fewer permutations, is obtained from the variant of the Berends, Giele, Kuijf formula given in Arxiv:0707.1035.Comment: 10 page

Decomposing the Sources of Earnings Inequality Assessing the Role of Reallocation

This paper uses matched employer-employee data from the Longitudinal Employer Household Dynamics database to investigate the contribution of worker and firm reallocation to within industry changes in wage inequality between 1992 and 2003. We find that the entry and exit of firms and the sorting of workers and firms based on underlying worker "skills" are important determinants of changes in industry earnings distributions over time. Our results suggest that the underlying dynamics of earnings inequality are complex and are due to factors that cannot be measured in standard crosssectional data.

An extended Hubbard model with ring exchange: a route to a non-Abelian topological phase

We propose an extended Hubbard model on a 2D Kagome lattice with an additional ring-exchange term. The particles can be either bosons or spinless fermions . At a special filling fraction of 1/6 the model is analyzed in the lowest non-vanishing order of perturbation theory. Such ``undoped'' model is closely related to the Quantum Dimer Model. We show how to arrive at an exactly soluble point whose ground state manifold is the extensively degenerate ``d-isotopy space'', a necessary precondition for for a certain type of non-Abelian topological order. Near the ``special'' values, $d = 2 \cos \pi/(k+2)$, this space is expected to collapse to a stable topological phase with anyonic excitations closely related to SU(2) Chern-Simons theory at level k.Comment: 4 pages, 2 colour figures, submitted to PRL. For an extended treatment of a more general family of models see cond-mat/030912

Phase transition and hybrid star in a SU(2) chiral sigma model

We use a modified SU(2) chiral sigma model to study nuclear matter at high density using mean field approach. We also study the phase transition of nuclear matter to quark matter in the interior of highly dense neutron stars. Stable solutions of Tolman-Oppenheimer-Volkoff equations representing hybrid stars are obtained with a maximum mass of 1.69 $M_{\odot}$, radii around 9.3 kms and a quark matter core constituting nearly 55-85 % of the star radii.Comment: 19 pages, 9 figures, accepted for Mod. Phys. Letts.

The Three Loop Equation of State of QED at High Temperature

We present the three loop contribution (order $e^4$) to the pressure of massless quantum electrodynamics at nonzero temperature. The calculation is performed within the imaginary time formalism. Dimensional regularization is used to handle the usual, intermediate stage, ultraviolet and infrared singularities, and also to prevent overcounting of diagrams during resummation.Comment: ANL-HEP-PR-94-02, SPhT/94-054 (revised final version

Continuous star cluster formation in the spiral NGC 45

We determined ages for 52 star clusters with masses < 10^6 solar masses in the low surface brightness spiral galaxy NGC 45. Four of these candidates are old globular clusters located in the bulge. The remaining ones span a large age range. The cluster ages suggest a continuous star/cluster formation history without evidence for bursts, consistent with the galaxy being located in a relatively unperturbed environment in the outskirts of the Sculptor group.Comment: 4 pages, 3 figures. To appear in "Island Universes - Structure and Evolution of Disk Galaxies", Terschelling (Netherlands), July 200

Symmetry Breaking for Matter Coupled to Linearized Supergravity From the Perspective of the Current Supermultiplet

We consider a generic supersymmetric matter theory coupled to linearized supergravity, and analyze scenarios for spontaneous symmetry breaking in terms of vacuum expectation values of components of the current supermultiplet. When the vacuum expectation of the energy momentum tensor is zero, but the scalar current or pseudoscalar current gets an expectation, evaluation of the gravitino self energy using the supersymmetry current algebra shows that there is an induced gravitino mass term. The structure of this term generalizes the supergravity action with cosmological constant to theories with CP violation. When the vacuum expectation of the energy momentum tensor is nonzero, supersymmetry is broken; requiring cancellation of the cosmological constant gives the corresponding generalized gravitino mass formula.Comment: 11 page