Heavy ion collisions: puzzles and hopes

This talk is a brief summary of some theoretical issues in the field of hot and dense QCD matter and ultra-relativistic heavy ion collisions.Comment: 6 pages, invited talk presented at the conference "Physics at the LHC 2010", DESY, June 7-12, 2010 Minor corrections in reference

Merchant Transmission Investment

We examine the performance attributes of a merchant transmission investment framework that relies on �market driven� transmission investment to provide the infrastructure to support competitive wholesale markets for electricity. Under a stringent set of assumptions, the merchant investment model appears to solve the natural monopoly problem and the associated need for regulating transmission companies traditionally associated with electric transmission networks. We expand the model to incorporate imperfection in wholesale electricity markets, lumpiness in transmission investment opportunities, stochastic attributes of transmission networks and associated property rights definition issues, the effects of the behaviour system operators and transmission owners on transmission capacity and reliability, co-ordination and bargaining considerations, forward contract, commitment and asset specificity issues. This significantly undermines the attractive properties of the merchant investment model. Relying primarily on a market driven investment framework to govern investment is likely to lead to inefficient investment decisions and undermine the performance of competitive markets

A game interpretation of the Neumann problem for fully nonlinear parabolic and elliptic equations

We provide a deterministic-control-based interpretation for a broad class of fully nonlinear parabolic and elliptic PDEs with continuous Neumann boundary conditions in a smooth domain. We construct families of two-person games depending on a small parameter which extend those proposed by Kohn and Serfaty (2010). These new games treat a Neumann boundary condition by introducing some specific rules near the boundary. We show that the value function converges, in the viscosity sense, to the solution of the PDE as the parameter tends to zero. Moreover, our construction allows us to treat both the oblique and the mixed type Dirichlet-Neumann boundary conditions.Comment: 58 pages, 2 figure