Axion Decay in a Constant Electromagnetic Background Field and at Finite Temperature using World-line Methods

We investigate the radiative decay of the axion into two photons in an external electromagnetic field to one loop order. Our approach is based on the world-line formalism, which is very suitable to take into account the external field to all orders. Afterwards we discuss how the calculation could be generalized to finite temperature.Comment: 27 pages, 4 figures, corrected and added some references and added some remarks to appendix

Nonlinear viscous hydrodynamics in various dimensions using AdS/CFT

We compute coefficients of two-derivative terms in the hydrodynamic energy momentum tensor of a viscous fluid which has an AdS_D dual with D between 3 and 7. For the case of D=3 we obtain an exact AdS_3 black hole solution, valid to all orders in a derivative expansion, dual to a perfect fluid in 1+1 dimensions.Comment: 20 pages; typos corrected, references adde

Glauber coherence of single electron sources

Recently demonstrated solid state single electron sources generate different quantum states depending on their operation condition. For adiabatic and non-adiabatic sources we determine the Glauber correlation function in terms of the Floquet scattering matrix of the source. The correlation function provides full information on the shape of the state, on its time-dependent amplitude and phase, which makes the coherence properties of single electron states essential for the production of quantum multi-particle states.Comment: 4+ pages, 4 figure

Jumping Through Loops: On Soft Terms from Large Volume Compactifications

We subject the phenomenologically successful large volume scenario of hep-th/0502058 to a first consistency check in string theory. In particular, we consider whether the expansion of the string effective action is consistent in the presence of D-branes and O-planes. Due to the no-scale structure at tree-level, the scenario is surprisingly robust. We compute the modification of soft supersymmetry breaking terms, and find only subleading corrections. We also comment that for large-volume limits of toroidal orientifolds and fibered Calabi-Yau manifolds the corrections can be more important, and we discuss further checks that need to be performed.Comment: 57 page