10,504 research outputs found
Deterring a Nuclear Iran: The Devil in the Details
Explores the technical requirements for a deterrence regime against Iran should it acquire a nuclear weapons capability. Considers red lines, treaty arrangements, force deployment and bases, military assistance to Iran's neighbors, and crisis management
A Consistent Effective Theory of Long-Wavelength Cosmological Perturbations
Effective field theory provides a perturbative framework to study the
evolution of cosmological large-scale structure. We investigate the
underpinnings of this approach, and suggest new ways to compute correlation
functions of cosmological observables. We find that, in contrast with quantum
field theory, the appropriate effective theory of classical cosmological
perturbations involves interactions that are nonlocal in time. We describe an
alternative to the usual approach of smoothing the perturbations, based on a
path-integral formulation of the renormalization group equations. This
technique allows for improved handling of short-distance modes that are
perturbatively generated by long-distance interactions.Comment: submitted to Phys. Rev. D; corrected typ
How Decoherence Affects the Probability of Slow-Roll Eternal Inflation
Slow-roll inflation can become eternal if the quantum variance of the
inflaton field around its slowly rolling classical trajectory is converted into
a distribution of classical spacetimes inflating at different rates, and if the
variance is large enough compared to the rate of classical rolling that the
probability of an increased rate of expansion is sufficiently high. Both of
these criteria depend sensitively on whether and how perturbation modes of the
inflaton interact and decohere. Decoherence is inevitable as a result of
gravitationally-sourced interactions whose strength are proportional to the
slow-roll parameters. However, the weakness of these interactions means that
decoherence is typically delayed until several Hubble times after modes grow
beyond the Hubble scale. We present perturbative evidence that decoherence of
long-wavelength inflaton modes indeed leads to an ensemble of classical
spacetimes with differing cosmological evolutions. We introduce the notion of
per-branch observables---expectation values with respect to the different
decohered branches of the wave function---and show that the evolution of modes
on individual branches varies from branch to branch. Thus single-field
slow-roll inflation fulfills the quantum-mechanical criteria required for the
validity of the standard picture of eternal inflation. For a given potential,
the delayed decoherence can lead to slight quantitative adjustments to the
regime in which the inflaton undergoes eternal inflation.Comment: 27 pages, 3 figures; v2 reflects peer review process and has new
results in Section
Sport is king: an investigation into local media coverage of women's sport in the UK East Midlands
There has been a recent interest in research into national media coverage of female sport, particularly single events, but on-going sporting activities by women are rarely reported. This paper attempts to examine this subject at the local level, looking in general at women’s sport and in particular at women’s football in the East Midlands region of the UK. Quantitative methods were used to survey local newspapers and radio stations and interviews were carried out with a range of people relevant to the field of study. The topic of sports media is framed here with reference to research into masculinities and a socialist feminist approach is used to address problems. The data showed there was a significant and on-going imbalance in the amount of coverage and even some signs of a decline in women’s football reporting, in spite of a national resurgence of the sport itself. The authors try to account for this and suggest further areas of future study
De Sitter Space Without Dynamical Quantum Fluctuations
We argue that, under certain plausible assumptions, de Sitter space settles
into a quiescent vacuum in which there are no dynamical quantum fluctuations.
Such fluctuations require either an evolving microstate, or time-dependent
histories of out-of-equilibrium recording devices, which we argue are absent in
stationary states. For a massive scalar field in a fixed de Sitter background,
the cosmic no-hair theorem implies that the state of the patch approaches the
vacuum, where there are no fluctuations. We argue that an analogous conclusion
holds whenever a patch of de Sitter is embedded in a larger theory with an
infinite-dimensional Hilbert space, including semiclassical quantum gravity
with false vacua or complementarity in theories with at least one Minkowski
vacuum. This reasoning provides an escape from the Boltzmann brain problem in
such theories. It also implies that vacuum states do not uptunnel to
higher-energy vacua and that perturbations do not decohere while slow-roll
inflation occurs, suggesting that eternal inflation is much less common than
often supposed. On the other hand, if a de Sitter patch is a closed system with
a finite-dimensional Hilbert space, there will be Poincare recurrences and
dynamical Boltzmann fluctuations into lower-entropy states. Our analysis does
not alter the conventional understanding of the origin of density fluctuations
from primordial inflation, since reheating naturally generates a high-entropy
environment and leads to decoherence, nor does it affect the existence of
non-dynamical vacuum fluctuations such as those that give rise to the Casimir
effect.Comment: version accepted for publication in Foundations of Physic
Why Boltzmann Brains Don't Fluctuate Into Existence From the De Sitter Vacuum
Many modern cosmological scenarios feature large volumes of spacetime in a de
Sitter vacuum phase. Such models are said to be faced with a "Boltzmann Brain
problem" - the overwhelming majority of observers with fixed local conditions
are random fluctuations in the de Sitter vacuum, rather than arising via
thermodynamically sensible evolution from a low-entropy past. We argue that
this worry can be straightforwardly avoided in the Many-Worlds (Everett)
approach to quantum mechanics, as long as the underlying Hilbert space is
infinite-dimensional. In that case, de Sitter settles into a truly stationary
quantum vacuum state. While there would be a nonzero probability for observing
Boltzmann-Brain-like fluctuations in such a state, "observation" refers to a
specific kind of dynamical process that does not occur in the vacuum (which is,
after all, time-independent). Observers are necessarily out-of-equilibrium
physical systems, which are absent in the vacuum. Hence, the fact that
projection operators corresponding to states with observers in them do not
annihilate the vacuum does not imply that such observers actually come into
existence. The Boltzmann Brain problem is therefore much less generic than has
been supposed.Comment: Based on a talk given by SMC at, and to appear in the proceedings of,
the Philosophy of Cosmology conference in Tenerife, September 201
Extending Foster Care to Age 21: Weighing the Costs to Government against the Benefits to Youth
The Fostering Connections to Success and Increasing Adoptions Act of 2008 allows states to claim federal reimbursement for the costs of caring for and supervising Title IV-E eligible foster youth until their 21st birthday. This issue brief provides preliminary estimates of what the potential costs to government and the benefits to young people would be if states extend foster care to age 21. The analysis focuses on the increase in postsecondary educational attainment associated with allowing foster youth to remain in care until they are 21 years old and the resulting increase in lifetime earnings associated with postsecondary education. Researchers estimate that lifetime earnings would increase an average of two dollars for every dollar spent on keeping foster youth in care beyond age 18
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