Strings in Nontrivial Gravitino and Ramond-Ramond Backgrounds

In this paper we discuss deformations of the BRST operator of the fermionic string. These deformations preserve nilpotency of the BRST operator and correspond to turning on infinitesimal Gravitino and Ramond-Ramond spacetime fields.Comment: 6 pages, Latex; Based on a talk given at the 10th International Symposium on String Theory, Towha University, Fukuoka, Japan, July 200

Covariance Eigenvector Sparsity for Compression and Denoising

Sparsity in the eigenvectors of signal covariance matrices is exploited in this paper for compression and denoising. Dimensionality reduction (DR) and quantization modules present in many practical compression schemes such as transform codecs, are designed to capitalize on this form of sparsity and achieve improved reconstruction performance compared to existing sparsity-agnostic codecs. Using training data that may be noisy a novel sparsity-aware linear DR scheme is developed to fully exploit sparsity in the covariance eigenvectors and form noise-resilient estimates of the principal covariance eigenbasis. Sparsity is effected via norm-one regularization, and the associated minimization problems are solved using computationally efficient coordinate descent iterations. The resulting eigenspace estimator is shown capable of identifying a subset of the unknown support of the eigenspace basis vectors even when the observation noise covariance matrix is unknown, as long as the noise power is sufficiently low. It is proved that the sparsity-aware estimator is asymptotically normal, and the probability to correctly identify the signal subspace basis support approaches one, as the number of training data grows large. Simulations using synthetic data and images, corroborate that the proposed algorithms achieve improved reconstruction quality relative to alternatives.Comment: IEEE Transcations on Signal Processing, 2012 (to appear

Supersymmetry and Gravitational Quadrupoles

We derive model independent, non-perturbative supersymmetric sum rules for the gravitational quadrupole moments of arbitrary-spin particles in any N=1 supersymmetric theory. These sum rules select a ``preferred'' value of h=1 where the ``h-factor'' is the gravitational quadrupole analog of the gyromagnetic ratio or g-factor. This value of h=1 corresponds identically to the preferred field theory value obtained by tree-level unitarity considerations. The presently derived h-factor sum rule complements and generalizes previous work on electromagnetic moments where g=2 was shown to be preferred by both supersymmetric sum rule and tree-level unitarity arguments.Comment: 10 pages, plain Te

Massive Higher Spin States in String Theory and the Principle of Equivalence

In this paper we study three point functions of the Type II superstring involving one graviton and two massive states, focusing in particular on the spin-7/2 fermions at the first mass level. Defining a gravitational quadrupole ``h-factor'', we find that the non-minimal interactions of string states in general are parametrized by $h\ne1$, in contrast to the preferred field theory value of h=1 (for tree-level unitarity). This difference arises from the fact that consistent gravitational interactions of strings are related to the presence of a complete tower of massive states, not present in the ordinary field theory case.Comment: 14 pages, plain Te