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    Russian Television's Slow Progress:Two Steps Forward, One Step Back

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    Vanishing of Gravitational Particle Production in the Formation of Cosmic Strings

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    We consider the gravitationally induced particle production from the quantum vacuum which is defined by a free, massless and minimally coupled scalar field during the formation of a gauge cosmic string. Previous discussions of this topic estimate the power output per unit length along the string to be of the order of 106810^{68} ergs/sec/cm in the s-channel. We find that this production may be completely suppressed. A similar result is also expected to hold for the number of produced photons.Comment: 10 pages, Plain LaTex. Minor improvements. To appear in PR

    Quantum mechanics of a constrained electrically charged particle in the presence of electric currents

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    We discuss the dynamics of a classical spinless quantum particle carrying electric charge and constrained to move on a non singular static surface in ordinary three dimensional space in the presence of arbitrary configurations of time independent electric currents. Starting from the canonical action in the embedding space we show that a charged particle with charge qq couples to a term linear in qA3MqA^3M, where A3A^3 is the transverse component of the electromagnetic vector potential and MM is the mean curvature in the surface. This term cancels exactly a curvature contribution to the orbital magnetic moment of the particle. It is shown that particles, independently of the value of the charge, in addition to the known couplings to the geometry also couple to the mean curvature in the surface when a Neumann type of constraint is applied on the transverse fluctuations of the wave function. In contrast to a Dirrichlet constraint on the transverse fluctuations a Neumann type of constraint on these degrees of freedom will in general make the equations of motion non separable. The exceptions are the equations of motion for electrically neutral particles on surfaces with constant mean curvature. In the presence of electric currents the equation of motion of a charged particle is generally non separable independently of the coupling to the geometry and the boundary constraints.Comment: to appear in Phys.Rev.
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