Three Books on the Scottish Sixties

Discusses three recent books about Scottish culture in the 1960s: a collection of documents and interviews, The International Writers\u27 Conference Revisited, ed. Bartie and Bell; a collection of essays, The Scottish Sixties, ed. Bell and Gunn; and a monograph, The Edinburgh Festivals, by Angela Bartie

Involutory Hopf algebras and 3-manifold invariants

We establish a 3-manifold invariant for each finite-dimensional, involutory Hopf algebra. If the Hopf algebra is the group algebra of a group $G$, the invariant counts homomorphisms from the fundamental group of the manifold to $G$. The invariant can be viewed as a state model on a Heegaard diagram or a triangulation of the manifold. The computation of the invariant involves tensor products and contractions of the structure tensors of the algebra. We show that every formal expression involving these tensors corresponds to a unique 3-manifold modulo a well-understood equivalence. This raises the possibility of an algorithm which can determine whether two given 3-manifolds are homeomorphic.Comment: Figure 4 is missin

What is a virtual link?

Several authors have recently studied virtual knots and links because they admit invariants arising from R-matrices. We prove that every virtual link is uniquely represented by a link L in S X I, a thickened, compact, oriented surface S, such that the link complement (S X I) - L has no essential vertical cylinder.Comment: Published by Algebraic and Geometric Topology at http://www.maths.warwick.ac.uk/agt/AGTVol3/agt-3-20.abs.htm

LHC: Past, Present, and Future

In this overview talk, I give highlights of the first three years of the LHC operations at high energy, spanning heavy-ion physics, standard model measurements, and searches for new particles, which culminated in the discovery of the Higgs boson by the ATLAS and CMS experiments in 2012. I'll discuss what we found about the properties of the new particle in 10 months since the discovery and then talk about the future LHC program and preparations to the 2015 run at the center-of-mass energy of ~13 TeV. These proceedings are meant to be a snapshot of the LHC results as of May 2013 - the time of the conference. Many of the results shown in these proceedings have been since updated (sometimes significantly) just 4 months thereafter, when these proceedings were due. Nevertheless, keeping this writeup in sync with the results shown in the actual talk has some historical value, as, for one, it tells the reader how short is the turnaround time to update the results at the LHC. To help an appreciation of this fact, I briefly summarize the main changes between May and September 2013 in the Appendix.Comment: 12 pages, 6 Figures. To appear in Proceedings of the 25th Rencontres de Blois, "Particle Physics and Cosmology," May 26-31, 2103, Blois, Franc

Collider Searches for Extra Dimensions

Searches for extra spatial dimensions remain among the most popular new directions in our quest for physics beyond the Standard Model. High-energy collider experiments of the current decade should be able to find an ultimate answer to the question of their existence in a variety of models. Until the start of the LHC in a few years, the Tevatron will remain the key player in this quest. In this paper, we review the most recent results from the Tevatron on searches for large, 1/TeV-size, and Randall-Sundrum extra spatial dimensions, which have reached a new level of sensitivity and currently probe the parameter space beyond the existing constraints. While no evidence for the existence of extra dimensions has been found so far, an exciting discovery might be just steps away.Comment: To appear in Proceedings of SLAC Summer Institute, 2004. An extended version of the talk given on behalf of the CDF and D0 Collaboration