2,283 research outputs found
Curved dilatonic brane worlds
We construct a broad family of exact solutions to the five-dimensional
Einstein equations coupled to a scalar field with an exponential potential.
Embedding a three-brane in these bulk space-times in a particular way we obtain
a class of self-tuned curved brane worlds in which the vacuum energy on the
brane is gravitationally idle, the four-dimensional geometry being insensitive
to the value of the brane tension. This self-tuning arises from cancellations,
enforced by the junction conditions, between the scalar field potential, the
brane vacuum energy and the matter on the brane. Finally, we study some
physically relevant examples and their dynamics.Comment: v2: 10 pages, RevTeX4. Minor changes. Typos corrected and references
added. New paragraph included in the conclusions discussing the role of the
singularities in the self-tuning mechanism. Final version to appear in
Physical Review
Initial Conditions and the Structure of the Singularity in Pre-Big-Bang Cosmology
We propose a picture, within the pre-big-bang approach, in which the universe
emerges from a bath of plane gravitational and dilatonic waves. The waves
interact gravitationally breaking the exact plane symmetry and lead generically
to gravitational collapse resulting in a singularity with the Kasner-like
structure. The analytic relations between the Kasner exponents and the initial
data are explicitly evaluated and it is shown that pre-big-bang inflation may
occur within a dense set of initial data. Finally, we argue that plane waves
carry zero gravitational entropy and thus are, from a thermodynamical point of
view, good candidates for the universe to emerge from.Comment: 18 pages, LaTeX, epsfig. 3 figures included. Minor changes; paragraph
added in the introduction, references added and typos corrected. Final
version published in Classical and Quantum Gravit
Can be gravitational waves markers for an extra-dimension?
The main issue of the present letter is to fix specific features (which turn
out being independent of extradimension size) of gravitational waves generated
before a dimensional compactification process. Valuable is the possibility to
detect our prediction from gravitational wave experiment without high energy
laboratory investigation. In particular we show how gravitational waves can
bring information on the number of Universe dimensions. Within the framework of
Kaluza-Klein hypotheses, a different morphology arises between waves generated
before than the compactification process settled down and ordinary
4-dimensional waves. In the former case the scalar and tensor degrees of
freedom can not be resolved. As a consequence if were detected gravitational
waves having the feature here predicted (anomalous polarization amplitudes),
then they would be reliable markers for the existence of an extra dimension.Comment: 5 pages, two figure, to appear on Int. Journ. Mod. Phys.
The Vlasov limit and its fluctuations for a system of particles which interact by means of a wave field
In two recent publications [Commun. PDE, vol.22, p.307--335 (1997), Commun.
Math. Phys., vol.203, p.1--19 (1999)], A. Komech, M. Kunze and H. Spohn studied
the joint dynamics of a classical point particle and a wave type generalization
of the Newtonian gravity potential, coupled in a regularized way. In the
present paper the many-body dynamics of this model is studied. The Vlasov
continuum limit is obtained in form equivalent to a weak law of large numbers.
We also establish a central limit theorem for the fluctuations around this
limit.Comment: 68 pages. Smaller corrections: two inequalities in sections 3 and two
inequalities in section 4, and definition of a Banach space in appendix A1.
Presentation of LLN and CLT in section 4.3 improved. Notation improve
Kidney cell electrophoresis in space flight: Rationale, methods, results and flow cytometry applications
Cultures of human embryonic kidney cells consistently contain an electrophoretically separable subpopulation of cells that produce high levels of urokinase and have an electrophoretic mobility about 85 percent as high as that of the most mobile human embryonic kidney cells. This subpopulation is rich in large epithelioid cells that have relatively little internal structure. When resolution and throughput are adequate, free fluid electrophoresis can be used to isolate a broad band of low mobility cells which also produces high levels of plasminogen activators (PAs). In the course of performing this, it was discovered that all electrophoretic subpopulations of cultured human embryonic kidney cells produce some PAs and that separate subpopulations produce high quantities of different types of PA's. This information and the development of sensitive assays for this project have provided new insights into cell secretion mechanisms related to fibrinolysis. These advances would probably not have been made without the NASA program to explore fundamental questions of free fluid electrophoresis in space
Infrared Spectroscopy of a Massive Obscured Star Cluster in the Antennae Galaxies (NGC 4038/4039) with NIRSPEC
We present infrared spectroscopy of the Antennae Galaxies (NGC 4038/4039)
with NIRSPEC at the W. M. Keck Observatory. We imaged the star clusters in the
vicinity of the southern nucleus (NGC 4039) in 0.39" seeing in K-band using
NIRSPEC's slit-viewing camera. The brightest star cluster revealed in the
near-IR (M_K(0) = -17.9) is insignificant optically, but coincident with the
highest surface brightness peak in the mid-IR (12-18 micron) ISO image
presented by Mirabel et al. (1998). We obtained high signal-to-noise 2.03 -
2.45 micron spectra of the nucleus and the obscured star cluster at R ~ 1900.
The cluster is very young (4 Myr old), massive (16e6 M_sun), and compact
(density ~ 115 M_sun pc^(-3) within a 32 pc half-light radius), assuming a
Salpeter IMF (0.1 - 100 M_sun). Its hot stars have a radiation field
characterized by T_eff ~ 39,000 K, and they ionize a compact H II region with
n_e ~ 1e4 cm^(-3). The stars are deeply embedded in gas and dust (A_V ~ 9-10
mag), and their strong FUV field powers a clumpy photodissociation region with
densities n_H >= 1e5 cm^(-3) on scales of up to 200 pc, radiating L[H_2 1-0
S(1)] = 9600 L_sun.Comment: 4 pages, 5 embedded figures. To appear in proceedings of 33d ESLAB
Symposium: Star Formation from the Small to the Large Scale, held in
Noordwijk, The Netherlands, Nov. 1999. Also available at
http://astro.berkeley.edu/~agilber
Cosmology with positive and negative exponential potentials
We present a phase-plane analysis of cosmologies containing a scalar field
with an exponential potential
where and may be positive or negative. We show that
power-law kinetic-potential scaling solutions only exist for sufficiently flat
() negative
potentials. The latter correspond to a class of ever-expanding cosmologies with
negative potential. However we show that these expanding solutions with a
negative potential are to unstable in the presence of ordinary matter, spatial
curvature or anisotropic shear, and generic solutions always recollapse to a
singularity. Power-law kinetic-potential scaling solutions are the late-time
attractor in a collapsing universe for steep negative potentials (the ekpyrotic
scenario) and stable against matter, curvature or shear perturbations.
Otherwise kinetic-dominated solutions are the attractor during collapse (the
pre big bang scenario) and are only marginally stable with respect to
anisotropic shear.Comment: 8 pages, latex with revtex, 9 figure
Fermi Coordinates and Penrose Limits
We propose a formulation of the Penrose plane wave limit in terms of null
Fermi coordinates. This provides a physically intuitive (Fermi coordinates are
direct measures of geodesic distance in space-time) and manifestly covariant
description of the expansion around the plane wave metric in terms of
components of the curvature tensor of the original metric, and generalises the
covariant description of the lowest order Penrose limit metric itself, obtained
in hep-th/0312029. We describe in some detail the construction of null Fermi
coordinates and the corresponding expansion of the metric, and then study
various aspects of the higher order corrections to the Penrose limit. In
particular, we observe that in general the first-order corrected metric is such
that it admits a light-cone gauge description in string theory. We also
establish a formal analogue of the Weyl tensor peeling theorem for the Penrose
limit expansion in any dimension, and we give a simple derivation of the
leading (quadratic) corrections to the Penrose limit of AdS_5 x S^5.Comment: 25 page
Large-scale magnetic fields from inflation due to Chern-Simons-like effective interaction
We discuss the generation of large-scale magnetic fields due to the breaking
of the conformal invariance in the electromagnetic field through the -even
dimension-six Chern-Simons-like effective interaction with a fermion current in
inflationary cosmology. It is shown that the magnetic fields on 1Mpc scale with
the field strength of G at the present time can be generated even
for the scale of the effective interaction being the Planck scale.Comment: 13 pages, 2 figures, additional explanations include
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