Strong coupling in Horava gravity

By studying perturbations about the vacuum, we show that Horava gravity suffers from two different strong coupling problems, extending all the way into the deep infra-red. The first of these is associated with the principle of detailed balance and explains why solutions to General Relativity are typically not recovered in models that preserve this structure. The second of these occurs even without detailed balance and is associated with the breaking of diffeomorphism invariance, required for anisotropic scaling in the UV. Since there is a reduced symmetry group there are additional degrees of freedom, which need not decouple in the infra-red. Indeed, we use the Stuckelberg trick to show that one of these extra modes become strongly coupled as the parameters approach their desired infra-red fixed point. Whilst we can evade the first strong coupling problem by breaking detailed balance, we cannot avoid the second, whatever the form of the potential. Therefore the original Horava model, and its "phenomenologically viable" extensions do not have a perturbative General Relativity limit at any scale. Experiments which confirm the perturbative gravitational wave prediction of General Relativity, such as the cumulative shift of the periastron time of binary pulsars, will presumably rule out the theory.Comment: 11 page

The Black Hole and Cosmological Solutions in IR modified Horava Gravity

Recently Horava proposed a renormalizable gravity theory in four dimensions which reduces to Einstein gravity with a non-vanishing cosmological constant in IR but with improved UV behaviors. Here, I study an IR modification which breaks "softly" the detailed balance condition in Horava model and allows the asymptotically flat limit as well. I obtain the black hole and cosmological solutions for "arbitrary" cosmological constant that represent the analogs of the standard Schwartzschild-(A)dS solutions which can be asymptotically (A)dS as well as flat and I discuss some thermodynamical properties. I also obtain solutions for FRW metric with an arbitrary cosmological constant. I study its implication to the dark energy and find that it seems to be consistent with current observational data.Comment: Footnote 5 about the the very meaning of the horizons and Hawking temperature is added; Accepted in JHE

Correlation effects in ionic crystals: I. The cohesive energy of MgO

High-level quantum-chemical calculations, using the coupled-cluster approach and extended one-particle basis sets, have been performed for (Mg2+)n (O2-)m clusters embedded in a Madelung potential. The results of these calculations are used for setting up an incremental expansion for the correlation energy of bulk MgO. This way, 96% of the experimental cohesive energy of the MgO crystal is recovered. It is shown that only 60% of the correlation contribution to the cohesive energy is of intra-ionic origin, the remaining part being caused by van der Waals-like inter-ionic excitations.Comment: LaTeX, 20 pages, no figure

Magnetic fields in supernova remnants and pulsar-wind nebulae

We review the observations of supernova remnants (SNRs) and pulsar-wind nebulae (PWNe) that give information on the strength and orientation of magnetic fields. Radio polarimetry gives the degree of order of magnetic fields, and the orientation of the ordered component. Many young shell supernova remnants show evidence for synchrotron X-ray emission. The spatial analysis of this emission suggests that magnetic fields are amplified by one to two orders of magnitude in strong shocks. Detection of several remnants in TeV gamma rays implies a lower limit on the magnetic-field strength (or a measurement, if the emission process is inverse-Compton upscattering of cosmic microwave background photons). Upper limits to GeV emission similarly provide lower limits on magnetic-field strengths. In the historical shell remnants, lower limits on B range from 25 to 1000 microGauss. Two remnants show variability of synchrotron X-ray emission with a timescale of years. If this timescale is the electron-acceleration or radiative loss timescale, magnetic fields of order 1 mG are also implied. In pulsar-wind nebulae, equipartition arguments and dynamical modeling can be used to infer magnetic-field strengths anywhere from about 5 microGauss to 1 mG. Polarized fractions are considerably higher than in SNRs, ranging to 50 or 60% in some cases; magnetic-field geometries often suggest a toroidal structure around the pulsar, but this is not universal. Viewing-angle effects undoubtedly play a role. MHD models of radio emission in shell SNRs show that different orientations of upstream magnetic field, and different assumptions about electron acceleration, predict different radio morphology. In the remnant of SN 1006, such comparisons imply a magnetic-field orientation connecting the bright limbs, with a non-negligible gradient of its strength across the remnant.Comment: 20 pages, 24 figures; to be published in SpSciRev. Minor wording change in Abstrac

Caustic avoidance in Horava-Lifshitz gravity

There are at least four versions of Horava-Lishitz gravity in the literature. We consider the version without the detailed balance condition with the projectability condition and address one aspect of the theory: avoidance of caustics for constant time hypersurfaces. We show that there is no caustic with plane symmetry in the absence of matter source if \lambda\ne 1. If \lambda=1 is a stable IR fixed point of the renormalization group flow then \lambda is expected to deviate from 1 near would-be caustics, where the extrinsic curvature increases and high-energy corrections become important. Therefore, the absence of caustics with \lambda\ne 1 implies that caustics cannot form with this symmetry in the absence of matter source. We argue that inclusion of matter source will not change the conclusion. We also argue that caustics with codimension higher than one will not form because of repulsive gravity generated by nonlinear higher curvature terms. These arguments support our conjecture that there is no caustic for constant time hypersurfaces. Finally, we discuss implications to the recently proposed scenario of ``dark matter as integration constant''.Comment: 19 pages; extended to general z \geq 3, typos corrected (v2); version accepted for publication in JCAP (v3

Extremal black holes in the Ho\v{r}ava-Lifshitz gravity

We study the near-horizon geometry of extremal black holes in the $z=3$ Ho\v{r}ava-Lifshitz gravity with a flow parameter $\lambda$. For $\lambda>1/2$, near-horizon geometry of extremal black holes are AdS$_2 \times S^2$ with different radii, depending on the (modified) Ho\v{r}ava-Lifshitz gravity. For $1/3\le \lambda \le 1/2$, the radius $v_2$ of $S^2$ is negative, which means that the near-horizon geometry is ill-defined and the corresponding Bekenstein-Hawking entropy is zero. We show explicitly that the entropy function approach does not work for obtaining the Bekenstein-Hawking entropy of extremal black holes.Comment: 18 pages, v2:some points on Lifshitz black holes claified, v3: version to appear in EJP

Weak Localization Effect in Superconductors by Radiation Damage

Large reductions of the superconducting transition temperature $T_{c}$ and the accompanying loss of the thermal electrical resistivity (electron-phonon interaction) due to radiation damage have been observed for several A15 compounds, Chevrel phase and Ternary superconductors, and $\rm{NbSe_{2}}$ in the high fluence regime. We examine these behaviors based on the recent theory of weak localization effect in superconductors. We find a good fitting to the experimental data. In particular, weak localization correction to the phonon-mediated interaction is derived from the density correlation function. It is shown that weak localization has a strong influence on both the phonon-mediated interaction and the electron-phonon interaction, which leads to the universal correlation of $T_{c}$ and resistance ratio.Comment: 16 pages plus 3 figures, revtex, 76 references, For more information, Plesse see http://www.fen.bilkent.edu.tr/~yjki

Constraints on Dark Matter Annihilation in Clusters of Galaxies with the Fermi Large Area Telescope

Nearby clusters and groups of galaxies are potentially bright sources of high-energy gamma-ray emission resulting from the pair-annihilation of dark matter particles. However, no significant gamma-ray emission has been detected so far from clusters in the first 11 months of observations with the Fermi Large Area Telescope. We interpret this non-detection in terms of constraints on dark matter particle properties. In particular for leptonic annihilation final states and particle masses greater than ~200 GeV, gamma-ray emission from inverse Compton scattering of CMB photons is expected to dominate the dark matter annihilation signal from clusters, and our gamma-ray limits exclude large regions of the parameter space that would give a good fit to the recent anomalous Pamela and Fermi-LAT electron-positron measurements. We also present constraints on the annihilation of more standard dark matter candidates, such as the lightest neutralino of supersymmetric models. The constraints are particularly strong when including the fact that clusters are known to contain substructure at least on galaxy scales, increasing the expected gamma-ray flux by a factor of ~5 over a smooth-halo assumption. We also explore the effect of uncertainties in cluster dark matter density profiles, finding a systematic uncertainty in the constraints of roughly a factor of two, but similar overall conclusions. In this work, we focus on deriving limits on dark matter models; a more general consideration of the Fermi-LAT data on clusters and clusters as gamma-ray sources is forthcoming.Comment: accepted to JCAP, Corresponding authors: T.E. Jeltema and S. Profumo, minor revisions to be consistent with accepted versio

Dopaminergic Neuronal Imaging in Genetic Parkinson's Disease: Insights into Pathogenesis

Objectives:To compare the dopaminergic neuronal imaging features of different subtypes of genetic Parkinson's Disease.Methods:A retrospective study of genetic Parkinson's diseases cases in which DaTSCAN (123I-FP-CIT) had been performed. Specific non-displaceable binding was calculated for bilateral caudate and putamen for each case. The right:left asymmetry index and striatal asymmetry index was calculated.Results:Scans were available from 37 cases of monogenetic Parkinson's disease (7 glucocerebrosidase (GBA) mutations, 8 alpha-synuclein, 3 LRRK2, 7 PINK1, 12 Parkin). The asymmetry of radioligand uptake for Parkinson's disease with GBA or LRRK2 mutations was greater than that for Parkinson's disease with alpha synuclein, PINK1 or Parkin mutations.Conclusions:The asymmetry of radioligand uptake in Parkinsons disease associated with GBA or LRRK2 mutations suggests that interactions with additional genetic or environmental factors may be associated with dopaminergic neuronal loss