pp Wave Big Bangs: Matrix Strings and Shrinking Fuzzy Spheres

We find pp wave solutions in string theory with null-like linear dilatons. These provide toy models of big bang cosmologies. We formulate Matrix String Theory in these backgrounds. Near the big bang ``singularity'', the string theory becomes strongly coupled but the Yang-Mills description of the matrix string is weakly coupled. The presence of a second length scale allows us to focus on a specific class of non-abelian configurations, viz. fuzzy cylinders, for a suitable regime of parameters. We show that, for a class of pp waves, fuzzy cylinders which start out big at early times dynamically shrink into usual strings at sufficiently late times.Comment: 29 pages, ReVTeX and AMSLaTeX. 4 Figures. v2: Typo corrected and reference adde

Cosmologies with Null Singularities and their Gauge Theory Duals

We investigate backgrounds of Type IIB string theory with null singularities and their duals proposed in hep-th/0602107. The dual theory is a deformed N=4 Yang-Mills theory in 3+1 dimensions with couplings dependent on a light-like direction. We concentrate on backgrounds which become AdS_5 x S^5 at early and late times and where the string coupling is bounded, vanishing at the singularity. Our main conclusion is that in these cases the dual gauge theory is nonsingular. We show this by arguing that there exists a complete set of gauge invariant observables in the dual gauge theory whose correlation functions are nonsingular at all times. The two-point correlator for some operators calculated in the gauge theory does not agree with the result from the bulk supergravity solution. However, the bulk calculation is invalid near the singularity where corrections to the supergravity approximation become important. We also obtain pp-waves which are suitable Penrose limits of this general class of solutions, and construct the Matrix Membrane theory which describes these pp-wave backgrounds.Comment: 43 pages REVTeX and AMSLaTeX. v2: references adde

Supergravity, Supermembrane and M(atrix) model on PP-Waves

In the first part of this paper, we study the back-reaction of large-N light cone momentum on the maximally supersymmetric anti-pp-wave background. This gives the type IIA geometry of large-N D0-branes on curved space with fluxes. By taking an appropriate decoupling limit, we conjecture a new duality between string theory on that background and dual field theory on D0-branes which we derive by calculating linear coupling terms. Agreement of decoupling quantities, SO(3) \times SO(6) isometry and Higgs branch on both theories are shown. Also we find whenever dual field theory is weakly coupled, the curvature of the geometry is large. In the second part of this paper, we derive the supermembrane action on a general pp-wave background only through the properties of null Killing vector and through this, derive the Matrix model.Comment: 19 pages, LaTeX. v2: corrected interpretation of supergravity solutio

The Gamma-Ray Blazar Content of the Northern Sky

Using survey data, we have re-evaluated the correlation of flat spectrum radio sources with EGRET sources in the Northern sky. A likelihood analysis incorporating the radio and X-ray properties and the Gamma-ray source localization is used to gauge the reliability of associations and to search for counterparts of previously unidentified EGRET sources. Above |b|=10deg, where the classification is complete, we find that 70% of the Northern EGRET sources have counterparts similar to the bright EGRET blazars. For several of these we identify known blazar counterparts more likely than the earlier proposed 3EG association; for ~20 we have new identifications. Spectroscopic confirmation of these candidates is in progress and we have found flat spectrum radio quasars and BL Lac counterparts with redshifts as high as 4. We also find strong evidence for a set of 28 objects with no plausible counterpart like the known EGRET Blazars. These thus represent either a new extragalactic population or a population of Galactic objects with a large scale height. The survey has been extended into the plane, where we find several new blazar candidates; the bulk of the sources are, however, Galactic. Looking ahead to the GLAST era we predict that several of the present 3EG sources are composite and that higher resolution data will break these into multiple Blazar IDs.Comment: 13 pages, 6 figures, submitted to Ap

Space missions to detect the cosmic gravitational-wave background

It is thought that a stochastic background of gravitational waves was produced during the formation of the universe. A great deal could be learned by measuring this Cosmic Gravitational-wave Background (CGB), but detecting the CGB presents a significant technological challenge. The signal strength is expected to be extremely weak, and there will be competition from unresolved astrophysical foregrounds such as white dwarf binaries. Our goal is to identify the most promising approach to detect the CGB. We study the sensitivities that can be reached using both individual, and cross-correlated pairs of space based interferometers. Our main result is a general, coordinate free formalism for calculating the detector response that applies to arbitrary detector configurations. We use this general formalism to identify some promising designs for a GrAvitational Background Interferometer (GABI) mission. Our conclusion is that detecting the CGB is not out of reach.Comment: 22 pages, 7 figures, IOP style, References Adde

Symmetries of the near horizon of a Black Hole by Group Theoretic methods

We use group theoretic methods to obtain the extended Lie point symmetries of the quantum dynamics of a scalar particle probing the near horizon structure of a black hole. Symmetries of the classical equations of motion for a charged particle in the field of an inverse square potential and a monopole, in the presence of certain model magnetic fields and potentials are also studied. Our analysis gives the generators and Lie algebras generating the inherent symmetries.Comment: To appear in Int. J. Mod. Phys.

Automatically Generating Data Linkages Using a Domain-Independent Candidate Selection Approach

Abstract. One challenge for Linked Data is scalably establishing high-quality owl:sameAs links between instances (e.g., people, geographical locations, publications, etc.) in different data sources. Traditional ap-proaches to this entity coreference problem do not scale because they exhaustively compare every pair of instances. In this paper, we pro-pose a candidate selection algorithm for pruning the search space for entity coreference. We select candidate instance pairs by computing a character-level similarity on discriminating literal values that are chosen using domain-independent unsupervised learning. We index the instances on the chosen predicates ’ literal values to efficiently look up similar in-stances. We evaluate our approach on two RDF and three structured datasets. We show that the traditional metrics don’t always accurately reflect the relative benefits of candidate selection, and propose additional metrics. We show that our algorithm frequently outperforms alternatives and is able to process 1 million instances in under one hour on a single Sun Workstation. Furthermore, on the RDF datasets, we show that the entire entity coreference process scales well by applying our technique. Surprisingly, this high recall, low precision filtering mechanism frequently leads to higher F-scores in the overall system

Smearing Effect in Plane-Wave Matrix Model

Motivated by the usual D2-D0 system, we consider a configuration composed of flat membrane and fuzzy sphere membrane in plane-wave matrix model, and investigate the interaction between them. The configuration is shown to lead to a non-trivial interaction potential, which indicates that the fuzzy sphere membrane really behaves like a graviton, giant graviton. Interestingly, the interaction is of r^{-3} type rather than r^{-5} type. We interpret it as the interaction incorporating the smearing effect due to the fact that the considered supersymmetric flat membrane should span and spin in four dimensional subspace of plane-wave geometry.Comment: 26 pages; added referenc