Electric-Magnetic Duality and Topological Insulators

We work out the action of the SL(2,Z) electric-magnetic duality group for an insulator with a non-trivial permittivity, permeability and theta-angle. This theory has recently been proposed to be the correct low-energy effective action for topological insulators. As applications, we give manifestly SL(2,Z) covariant expressions for the Faraday rotation at orthogonal incidence at the interface of two such materials, as well as for the induced magnetic and electric charges, slightly clarifying the meaning of expressions previously derived in the literature. We also use electric-magnetic duality to find a gravitational dual for a strongly coupled version of this theory using the AdS/CFT correspondence.Comment: 4 pages; version accepted by PR

A simple variational principle for classical spinning particle with anomalous magnetic momentum

We obtain Bargmann-Michel-Telegdi equations of motion of classical spinning particle using Lagrangian variational principle with Grassmann variables.Comment: 3 pages, late

Extragalactic radio source evolution under the dual-population unification scheme

We show that a dual-population unification scheme provides a successful paradigm with which to describe the evolution and beaming of all bright extragalactic radio sources. The paradigm consists of two intrinsic radio-source populations, based on the two distinct radio-galaxy morphologies of Fanaroff-Riley classes I and II. These represent the `unbeamed' or `side-on' parent populations of steep radio spectra; the `beamed' source types including flat-spectrum quasars and BL Lac objects, arise through the random alignment of their radio-axis to our line-of-sight where Doppler-beaming of the relativistic radio jets produces highly anisotropic radio emission.Comment: 18 pages & 18 postscript figures, accepted for publication in MNRA

Finding the Pion in the Chiral Random Matrix Vacuum

The existence of a Goldstone boson is demonstrated in chiral random matrix theory. After determining the effective coupling and calculating the scalar and pseudoscalar propagators, a random phase approximation summation reveals the massless pion and massive sigma modes expected whenever chiral symmetry is spontaneously broken.Comment: 3 pages, 1 figure, revte

Criticism of "Necessity of simultaneous co-existence of instantaneous and retarded interactions in classical electrodynamics" by Andrew E. Chubykalo and Stoyan J. Vlaev

The demonstration that the electromagnetic fields derived from the Lienard-Wiechert potentials do not satisfy the Maxwell equations is proved to be false. Errors were made in the computation of the derivatives of retarded quantities. The subsequent inference of the necessity of both instantaneous and retarded electromagnetic interactions cannot be made. Different choices of gauge can lead to a variety of forms for the scalar and vector potentials, always with the same retarded fields. Classical electromagnetic theory is complete as usually expressed. One may choose to work in the Lorenz gauge in which all quantities are retarded.Comment: pdf file, 5 pages, submitted to Int. J. Mod. Phy