Dilatation operator and the Super Yang-Mills duals of open strings on AdS Giant Gravitons

We study the one-loop anomalous dimensions of the Super Yang-Mills dual operators to open strings ending on AdS giant gravitons. AdS giant gravitons have no upper bound for their angular momentum and we represent them by the contraction of scalar fields, carrying the appropriate R-charge, with a totally symmetric tensor. We represent the open string motion along AdS directions by appending to the giant graviton operator a product of fields including covariant derivatives. We derive a bosonic lattice Hamiltonian that describes the mixing of these excited AdS giants operators under the action of the one-loop dilatation operator of N=4 SYM. This Hamiltonian captures several intuitive differences with respect to the case of sphere giant gravitons. A semiclassical analysis of the Hamiltonian allows us to give a geometrical interpretation for the labeling used to describe the fields products appended to the AdS giant operators. It also allows us to show evidence for the existence of continuous bands in the Hamiltonian spectrum.Comment: 28 page

Noncommutative fermions and Morita equivalence

We study the Morita equivalence for fermion theories on noncommutative two-tori. For rational values of the $\theta$ parameter (in appropriate units) we show the equivalence between an abelian noncommutative fermion theory and a nonabelian theory of twisted fermions on ordinary space. We study the chiral anomaly and compute the determinant of the Dirac operator in the dual theories showing that the Morita equivalence also holds at this level.Comment: 12 pages, LaTex file, no figures. Minor corrections, version to appear in Phys. Lett.

Ladder exponentiation for generic large symmetric representation Wilson loops

A recent proposal was made for a large representation rank limit for which the expectation values of N = 4 super Yang-Mills Wilson loops are given by the exponential of the 1-loop result. We verify the validity of this exponentiation in the strong coupling limit using the holographic D3-brane description for straight Wilson loops following an arbitrary internal space trajectory.Comment: 12 pages, 1 figur

Quantum Corrals, Eigenmodes and Quantum Mirages in s-wave Superconductors

We study the electronic structure of magnetic and non-magnetic quantum corrals embedded in s-wave superconductors. We demonstrate that a quantum mirage of an impurity bound state peak can be projected from the occupied into the empty focus of a non-magnetic quantum corral via the excitation of the corral's eigenmodes. We observe an enhanced coupling between magnetic impurities inside the corral, which can be varied through oscillations in the corral's impurity potential. Finally, we discuss the form of eigenmodes in magnetic quantum corrals.Comment: 4 pages, 4 figure

Predation risk reduces a female preference for heterospecific males in the green swordtail

The presence of a predator can result in the alteration, loss or reversal of a mating preference. Under predation risk, females often change their initial preference for conspicuous males, favouring less flashy males to reduce the risk of being detected by predators. Previous studies on predator-induced plasticity in mate preferences have given females a choice between more and less conspicuous conspecific males. However, in species that naturally hybridize, it is also possible that females might choose an inconspicuous heterospecific male over a conspicuous conspecific male under predation risk. Our study addresses this question using the green swordtail (Xiphophorus helleri) and the southern platyfish (Xiphophorus maculatus), which are sympatric in the wild. We hypothesized that X. helleri females would prefer the sworded conspecific males in the absence of a predator but favour the less conspicuous, swordless, heterospecific males in the presence of a predator. Contrary to our expectation, females associated more with the heterospecific male than the conspecific male in the control (no predator) treatment, and they were non-choosy in the predator treatment. This might reflect that females were attracted to the novel male phenotype when there was no risk of predation but became more neophobic after predator exposure. Regardless of the underlying mechanism, our results suggest that predation pressure may affect female preferences for conspecific versus heterospecific males. We also found striking within-population, between-individual variation in behavioural plasticity: females differed in the strength and direction of their preferences, as well as in the extent to which they altered their preferences in response to changes in perceived predation risk. Such variation in female preferences for heterospecific males could potentially lead to temporal and spatial variation in hybridization rates in the wild