2,263 research outputs found
The screwworm eradication data system archives
The archives accumulated during 1 year of operation of the Satellite Temperature-Monitoring System during development of the Screwworm Eradication Data System are reported. Brief descriptions of all the kinds of tapes, as well as their potential uses, are presented. Reference is made to other documents that explain the generation of these data
Quantization in black hole backgrounds
Quantum field theory in a semiclassical background can be derived as an
approximation to quantum gravity from a weak-coupling expansion in the inverse
Planck mass. Such an expansion is studied for evolution on "nice-slices" in the
spacetime describing a black hole of mass M. Arguments for a breakdown of this
expansion are presented, due to significant gravitational coupling between
fluctuations, which is consistent with the statement that existing calculations
of information loss in black holes are not reliable. For a given fluctuation,
the coupling to subsequent fluctuations becomes of order unity by a time of
order M^3. Lack of a systematic derivation of the weakly-coupled/semiclassical
approximation would indicate a role for the non-perturbative dynamics of
gravity, and possibly for the proposal that such dynamics has an essentially
non-local quality.Comment: 28 pages, 4 figures, harvmac. v2: added refs, minor clarification
High energy QCD scattering, the shape of gravity on an IR brane, and the Froissart bound
High-energy scattering in non-conformal gauge theories is investigated using
the AdS/CFT dual string/gravity theory. It is argued that strong-gravity
processes, such as black hole formation, play an important role in the dual
dynamics. Further information about this dynamics is found by performing a
linearized analysis of gravity for a mass near an infrared brane; this gives
the far field approximation to black hole or other strong-gravity effects, and
in particular allows us to estimate their shape. From this shape, one can infer
a total scattering cross-section that grows with center of mass energy as ln^2
E, saturating the Froissart bound.Comment: 27 pages, 1 fig, harvmac. v2: references added, typos corrected v3:
typo correcte
Linking the trans-Planckian and the information loss problems in black hole physics
The trans-Planckian and information loss problems are usually discussed in
the literature as separate issues concerning the nature of Hawking radiation.
Here we instead argue that they are intimately linked, and can be understood as
"two sides of the same coin" once it is accepted that general relativity is an
effective field theory.Comment: 10 pages, 2 figures. Replaced with the version to be published in
General Relativity and Gravitatio
The information paradox and the locality bound
Hawking's argument for information loss in black hole evaporation rests on
the assumption of independent Hilbert spaces for the interior and exterior of a
black hole. We argue that such independence cannot be established without
incorporating strong gravitational effects that undermine locality and
invalidate the use of quantum field theory in a semiclassical background
geometry. These considerations should also play a role in a deeper
understanding of horizon complementarity.Comment: 21 pages, harvmac; v2-3. minor corrections, references adde
Information Loss and Anomalous Scattering
The approach of 't Hooft to the puzzles of black hole evaporation can be
applied to a simpler system with analogous features. The system is
dimensional electrodynamics in a linear dilaton background. Analogues of black
holes, Hawking radiation and evaporation exist in this system. In perturbation
theory there appears to be an information paradox but this gets resolved in the
full quantum theory and there exists an exact -matrix, which is fully
unitary and information conserving. 't Hooft's method gives the leading terms
in a systematic approximation to the exact result.Comment: 18 pages, 3 figures (postscript files available soon on request),
(earlier version got corrupted by mail system
Dynamics of Extremal Black Holes
Particle scattering and radiation by a magnetically charged, dilatonic black
hole is investigated near the extremal limit at which the mass is a constant
times the charge. Near this limit a neighborhood of the horizon of the black
hole is closely approximated by a trivial product of a two-dimensional black
hole with a sphere. This is shown to imply that the scattering of
long-wavelength particles can be described by a (previously analyzed)
two-dimensional effective field theory, and is related to the
formation/evaporation of two-dimensional black holes. The scattering proceeds
via particle capture followed by Hawking re-emission, and naively appears to
violate unitarity. However this conclusion can be altered when the effects of
backreaction are included. Particle-hole scattering is discussed in the light
of a recent analysis of the two-dimensional backreaction problem. It is argued
that the quantum mechanical possibility of scattering off of extremal black
holes implies the potential existence of additional quantum numbers - referred
to as ``quantum whiskers'' - characterizing the black hole.Comment: 31 page
Spacetime Embedding Diagrams for Black Holes
We show that the 1+1 dimensional reduction (i.e., the radial plane) of the
Kruskal black hole can be embedded in 2+1 Minkowski spacetime and discuss how
features of this spacetime can be seen from the embedding diagram. The purpose
of this work is educational: The associated embedding diagrams may be useful
for explaining aspects of black holes to students who are familiar with special
relativity, but not general relativity.Comment: 22 pages, 21 figures, RevTex. To be submitted to the American Journal
of Physics. Experts will wish only to skim appendix A and to look at the
pictures. Suggested Maple code is now compatible with MapleV4r
Scales and hierarchies in warped compactifications and brane worlds
Warped compactifications with branes provide a new approach to the hierarchy
problem and generate a diversity of four-dimensional thresholds. We investigate
the relationships between these scales, which fall into two classes.
Geometrical scales, such as thresholds for Kaluza-Klein, excited string, and
black hole production, are generically determined soley by the spacetime
geometry. Dynamical scales, notably the scale of supersymmetry breaking and
moduli masses, depend on other details of the model. We illustrate these
relationships in a class of solutions of type IIB string theory with imaginary
self-dual fluxes. After identifying the geometrical scales and the resulting
hierarchy, we determine the gravitino and moduli masses through explicit
dimensional reduction, and estimate their value to be near the four-dimensional
Planck scale. In the process we obtain expressions for the superpotential and
Kahler potential, including the effects of warping. We identify matter living
on certain branes to be effectively sequestered from the supersymmetry breaking
fluxes: specifically, such "visible sector" fields receive no tree-level masses
from the supersymmetry breaking. However, loop corrections are expected to
generate masses, at the phenomenologically viable TeV scale.Comment: 33 pages, LaTeX. v2: reference added v3: reference added, typos
correcte
Exact Four-Dimensional Dyonic Black Holes and Bertotti-Robinson Spacetimes in String Theory
Conformal field theories corresponding to two-dimensional electrically
charged black holes and to two-dimensional anti-de Sitter space with a
covariantly constant electric field are simply constructed as WZW
coset models. The two-dimensional electrically charged black holes are related
by Kaluza-Klein reduction to the 2+1-dimensional rotating black hole of
Banados, Teitelboim and Zanelli, and our construction is correspondingly
related to its realization as a WZW model. Four-dimensional spacetime solutions
are obtained by tensoring these two-dimensional theories with
coset models. These describe a family of dyonic black holes and the
Bertotti--Robinson universe.Comment: 10 pages, harvmac, (Reference to Kaloper added.
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