Destroying black holes with test bodies

If a black hole can accrete a body whose spin or charge would send the black hole parameters over the extremal limit, then a naked singularity would presumably form, in violation of the cosmic censorship conjecture. We review some previous results on testing cosmic censorship in this way using the test body approximation, focusing mostly on the case of neutral black holes. Under certain conditions a black hole can indeed be over-spun or over-charged in this approximation, hence radiative and self-force effects must be taken into account to further test cosmic censorship.Comment: Contribution to the proceedings of the First Mediterranean Conference on Classical and Quantum Gravity (talk given by T. P. S.). Summarizes the results of Phys. Rev. Lett. 103, 141101 (2009), arXiv:0907.4146 [gr-qc] and considers further example

Bound on the Dark Matter Density in the Solar System from Planetary Motions

High precision planet orbital data extracted from direct observation, spacecraft explorations and laser ranging techniques enable to put a strong constraint on the maximal dark matter density of a spherical halo centered around the Sun. The maximal density at Earth's location is of the order $10^5$ ${\rm GeV/cm^3}$ and shows only a mild dependence on the slope of the halo profile, taken between 0 and -2. This bound is somewhat better than that obtained from the perihelion precession limits.Comment: 7 pages, 1 figur

Exemplary Teaching and Exemplary Teachers: A Prologue

Suzanne F. Davis brings a wide background in both teaching and administration to her role as guest editor of the Reading Horizons themed issue on exemplary teaching and exemplary teachers

Minimal Off-Shell Version of N = 1 Chiral Supergravity

We construct the minimal off-shell formulation of N = 1 chiral supergravity (SUGRA) introducing a complex antisymmetric tensor field $B_{\mu \nu}$ and a complex axial-vector field $A_{\mu}$ as auxiliary fields. The resulting algebra of the right- and left-handed supersymmetry (SUSY) transformations closes off shell and generates chiral gauge transforamtions and vector gauge transformations in addition to the transformations which appear in the case without auxiliary fields.Comment: 9 pages, late

Short-form Philadelphia Naming Test: Rationale and Empirical Evaluation

This project translates research findings from the Philadelphia (picture) Naming Test into a clinical tool for diagnosis and measurement of change. The tool is a pair of 5-minute naming tests, each involving a different, representative set of 30 PNT targets. In an evaluation carried out with a well-distributed sample of 25 individuals with chronic aphasia, accuracy scores on the short forms, PNT30-A and –B, were highly correlated with the full PNT and with each other. By utilizing the extensive research database from the PNT, score equivalents and norms are calculated that can be applied in the clinical setting

BF Actions for the Husain-Kuchar Model

We show that the Husain-Kuchar model can be described in the framework of BF theories. This is a first step towards its quantization by standard perturbative QFT techniques or the spin-foam formalism introduced in the space-time description of General Relativity and other diff-invariant theories. The actions that we will consider are similar to the ones describing the BF-Yang-Mills model and some mass generating mechanisms for gauge fields. We will also discuss the role of diffeomorphisms in the new formulations that we propose.Comment: 21 pages (in DIN A4 format), minor typos corrected; to appear in Phys. Rev.

Astrophysical Bounds on Planck Suppressed Lorentz Violation

This article reviews many of the observational constraints on Lorentz symmetry violation (LV). We first describe the GZK cutoff and other phenomena that are sensitive to LV. After a brief historical sketch of research on LV, we discuss the effective field theory description of LV and related questions of principle, technical results, and observational constraints. We focus on constraints from high energy astrophysics on mass dimension five operators that contribute to LV electron and photon dispersion relations at order E/M_Planck. We also briefly discuss constraints on renormalizable operators, and review the current and future contraints on LV at order (E/M_Planck)^2.Comment: 30 pages, submitted to Lecture Notes in Physics, Quantum Gravity Phenomenology, eds. G.Amelino-Camelia, J. Kowalski-Glikman (Springer-Verlag

Preferred foliation effects in Quantum General Relativity

We investigate the infrared (IR) effects of Lorentz violating terms in the gravitational sector using functional renormalization group methods similar to Reuter and collaborators. The model we consider consists of pure quantum gravity coupled to a preferred foliation, described effectively via a scalar field with non-standard dynamics. We find that vanishing Lorentz violation is a UV attractive fixed-point of this model in the local potential approximation. Since larger truncations may lead to differing results, we study as a first example effects of additional matter fields on the RG running of the Lorentz violating term and provide a general argument why they are small.Comment: 12 pages, no figures, compatible with published versio

Self-Dual Action for Fermionic Fields and Gravitation

This paper studies the self-dual Einstein-Dirac theory. A generalization is obtained of the Jacobson-Smolin proof of the equivalence between the self-dual and Palatini purely gravitational actions. Hence one proves equivalence of self-dual Einstein-Dirac theory to the Einstein-Cartan-Sciama-Kibble-Dirac theory. The Bianchi symmetry of the curvature, core of the proof, now contains a non-vanishing torsion. Thus, in the self-dual framework, the extra terms entering the equations of motion with respect to the standard Einstein-Dirac field equations, are neatly associated with torsion.Comment: 13 pages, plain-tex, recently appearing in Nuovo Cimento B, volume 109, pages 973-982, September 199