Grass-endophytes in plant protection

Agriculturists have long known that certain grass species infected with systemic fungal endophytes are highly resistant to both vertebrate and invertebrate herbivores

Recent progress in Affleck-Dine baryogenesis

In the MSSM, cosmological scalar field condensates formed along flat directions of the scalar potential (Affleck-Dine condensates) are typically unstable with respect to formation of Q-balls, a type of non-topological soliton. I discuss the creation and growth of the quantum seed fluctuations which catalyse the collapse of the condensate. In D-term inflation models, the fluctuations of squark fields in the flat directions also give rise to isocurvature density fluctuations stored in the Affleck-Dine condensate. After the condensate breaks up, these can be perturbations in the baryon number, or, in the case where the present neutralino density comes directly from B-ball decay, perturbations in the number of dark matter neutralinos. The latter case results in a large enhancement of the isocurvature perturbation, which should be observable by PLANCK.Comment: 8 pages, 2 figures; invited talk at COSMO9

Sequences with long range exclusions

Given an alphabet $S$, we consider the size of the subsets of the full sequence space $S^{\rm {\bf Z}}$ determined by the additional restriction that $x_i\not=x_{i+f(n)},\ i\in {\rm {\bf Z}},\ n\in {\rm {\bf N}}.$ Here $f$ is a positive, strictly increasing function. We review an other, graph theoretic, formulation and then the known results covering various combinations of $f$ and the alphabet size. In the second part of the paper we turn to the fine structure of the allowed sequences in the particular case where $f$ is a suitable polynomial. The generation of sequences leads naturally to consider the problem of their maximal length, which turns out highly random asymptotically in the alphabet size.Comment: 18 pages, 3 figures. Replaces earlier version, submission 1204.3439, major updat

QCD-like technicolor on the lattice

This talk gives an overview, aimed at non-experts, of the recent progress on the studies of technicolor models on the lattice. Phenomenologically successful technicolor models require walking coupling; thus, an emphasis is put on the determination of the beta-function of various models. As a case study we consider SU(2) gauge field theory with two adjoint representation fermions, so-called minimal walking technicolor theory.Comment: 6 pages; talk presented at "Quark Confinement and the Hadron Spectrum IX", Universidad Complutense de Madrid, 30 August--3 September 201