The Evolution of Protoplanetary Disks Around Millisecond Pulsars: The PSR 1257 +12 System

We model the evolution of protoplanetary disks surrounding millisecond pulsars, using PSR 1257+12 as a test case. Initial conditions were chosen to correspond to initial angular momenta expected for supernova-fallback disks and disks formed from the tidal disruption of a companion star. Models were run under two models for the viscous evolution of disks: fully viscous and layered accretion disk models. Supernova-fallback disks result in a distribution of solids confined to within 1-2 AU and produce the requisite material to form the three known planets surrounding PSR 1257+12. Tidal disruption disks tend to slightly underproduce solids interior to 1 AU, required for forming the pulsar planets, while overproducing the amount of solids where no body, lunar mass or greater, exists. Disks evolving under 'layered' accretion spread somewhat less and deposit a higher column density of solids into the disk. In all cases, circumpulsar gas dissipates on $\lesssim 10^{5}$ year timescales, making formation of gas giant planets highly unlikely.Comment: 16 pages, 17 figures, Accepted for publication in The Astrophysical Journal (September 20, 2007 issue

Inhomogeneity driven by Higgs instability in gapless superconductor

The fluctuations of the Higgs and pseudo Nambu-Goldstone fields in the 2SC phase with mismatched pairing are described in the nonlinear realization framework of the gauged Nambu--Jona-Lasinio model. In the gapless 2SC phase, not only Nambu-Goldstone currents can be spontaneously generated, but the Higgs field also exhibits instablity. The Nambu-Goldstone currents generation indicates the formation of the single plane wave LOFF state and breaks rotation symmetry, while the Higgs instability favors spatial inhomogeneity and breaks translation invariance. In this paper, we focus on the Higgs instability which has not drawn much attention yet. The Higgs instability cannot be removed without a long range force, thus it persists in the gapless superfluidity and induces phase separation. In the case of g2SC state, the Higgs instability can only be partially removed by the electric Coulomb energy. However, it is not excluded that the Higgs instability might be completely removed in the charge neutral gCFL phase by the color Coulomb energy.Comment: 21 pages, 5 figure

Radial Correlations between two quarks

In nuclear many-body problems the short-range correlation between two nucleons is well described by the corresponding correlation in the {two}-body problem. Therefore, as a first step in any attempt at an analogous description of many-quark systems, it is necessary to know the two-quark correlation. With this in mind, we study the light quark distribution in a heavy-light meson with a static heavy quark. The charge and matter radial distributions of these heavy-light mesons are measured on a lattice with a light quark mass about that of the strange quark. Both distributions can be well fitted upto r approx 0.7 fm with the exponential form w_i^2(r), where w_i(r)=A exp(-r/r_i). For the charge(c) and matter(m) distributions r_c approx 0.32(2) fm and r_m \approx 0.24(2) fm. We also discuss the normalisation of the total charge (defined to be unity in the continuum limit) and matter integrated over all space, finding 1.30(5) and 0.4(1) respectively for a lattice spacing approx 0.17 fm.Comment: 8 pages, 3 ps figure

TeV Strings and the Neutrino-Nucleon Cross Section at Ultra-high Energies

In scenarios with the fundamental unification scale at the TeV one expects string excitations of the standard model fields at accessible energies. We study the neutrino-nucleon cross section in these models. We show that duality of the scattering amplitude forces the existence of a tower of massive leptoquarks that mediate the process in the s-channel. Using the narrow-width approximation we find a sum rule for the production rate of resonances with different spin at each mass level. We show that these contributions can increase substantially the standard model neutrino-nucleon cross section, although seem insufficient in order to explain the cosmic ray events above the GZK cutoff energy.Comment: 10 pages, 1 figure, version to appear in PR

ARPES studies of cuprate Fermiology: superconductivity, pseudogap, and quasiparticle dynamics

We present angle-resolved photoemission spectroscopy (ARPES) studies of the cuprate high-temperature superconductors which elucidate the relation between superconductivity and the pseudogap and highlight low-energy quasiparticle dynamics in the superconducting state. Our experiments suggest that the pseudogap and superconducting gap represent distinct states, which coexist below T$_c$. Studies on Bi-2212 demonstrate that the near-nodal and near-antinodal regions behave differently as a function of temperature and doping, implying that different orders dominate in different momentum-space regions. However, the ubiquity of sharp quasiparticles all around the Fermi surface in Bi-2212 indicates that superconductivity extends into the momentum-space region dominated by the pseudogap, revealing subtlety in this dichotomy. In Bi-2201, the temperature dependence of antinodal spectra reveals particle-hole asymmetry and anomalous spectral broadening, which may constrain the explanation for the pseudogap. Recognizing that electron-boson coupling is an important aspect of cuprate physics, we close with a discussion of the multiple 'kinks' in the nodal dispersion. Understanding these may be important to establishing which excitations are important to superconductivity.Comment: To appear in a focus issue on 'Fermiology of Cuprates' in New Journal of Physic

Metastable Vacua and the Backreacted Stenzel Geometry

We construct an M-theory background dual to the metastable state recently discussed by Klebanov and Pufu, which corresponds to placing a stack of anti-M2 branes at the tip of a warped Stenzel space. With this purpose we analytically solve for the linearized non-supersymmetric deformations around the warped Stenzel space, preserving the SO(5) symmetries of the supersymmetric background, and which interpolate between the IR and UV region. We identify the supergravity solution which corresponds to a stack of $\bar{N}$ backreacting anti-M2 branes by fixing all the 12 integration constants in terms of $\bar{N}$. While in the UV this solution has the desired features to describe the conjectured metastable state of the dual (2+1)-dimensional theory, in the IR it suffers from a singularity in the four-form flux, which we describe in some details.Comment: 33 pages, 3 figure