The initial conditions of the Universe and holography

We address the initial conditions for an expanding cosmology using the holographic principle. For the case of a closed model, the old prescription of Fishler and Susskind, that uses the particle horizon to encode the bulk degrees of freedom, can be implemented for accelerated models with enough acceleration. As a bonus we have singularity free bouncing models. The bound is saturated for co-dimension one branes dominated universes.Comment: Talk presented at the XXVIII Spanish Relativity Meeting E.R.E. 2005, Oviedo, September 6-10, 2005, to be published by AIP Conference Proceedings, 4 page

Magnetization switching in nanoscale ferromagnetic grains: simulations with heterogeneous nucleation

We present results obtained with various types of heterogeneous nucleation in a kinetic Ising model of magnetization switching in single-domain ferromagnetic nanoparticles. We investigate the effect of the presence of the system boundary and make comparison with simulations on periodic lattices. We also study systems with bulk disorder and compare how two different types of disorder influence the switching behavior.Comment: 3 pages, 4 Postscript figure

Graphical and Kinematical Approach to Cosmological Horizons

We study the apparition of event horizons in accelerated expanding cosmologies. We give a graphical and analytical representation of the horizons using proper distances to coordinate the events. Our analysis is mainly kinematical. We show that, independently of the dynamical equations, all the event horizons tend in the future infinity to a given expression depending on the scale factor that we call asymptotic horizon. We also encounter a subclass of accelerating models without horizon. When the ingoing null geodesics do not change concavity in its cosmic evolution we recover the de Sitter and quintessence-Friedmann-Robertson-Walker models.Comment: Latex2e, 27 pages, 4 figures, submitted to Class. Quantum Gra