Rescattering effects in hadron-nucleus and heavy-ion collisions

We review the extension of the factorization formalism of perturbative QCD to {\it coherent} soft rescattering associated with hard scattering in high energy nuclear collisions. We emphasize the ability to quantify high order corrections and the predictive power of factorization approach in terms of universal nonperturbative matrix elements. Although coherent rescattering effects are power suppressed by hard scales of the scattering, they are enhanced by the nuclear size and could play an important role in understanding the novel nuclear dependence observed in high energy nuclear collisions.Comment: 8 pages, 13 figures, to be published in the Proceedings of 1st International Conference on Hard and Electromagnetic Probes of High Energy Nuclear Collisions (Hard Probe 2004), Ericeira, Portugal, Nov. 4-10, 200

Can the Big Bang Singularity be avoided by a single scalar field?

In this note, we investigate the possibility of avoiding the Big Bang singularity with a single scalar field which couples non-minimally to gravity. We show that in the case that gravity couples linearly to the field, some severe conditions on the field's potential have to be imposed. However, in non-linear case, it is quite generic to avoid the singularity with single scalar field.Comment: 9 pages, 7 figure