On a Conjecture of Givental

These brief notes record our puzzles and findings surrounding Givental's recent conjecture which expresses higher genus Gromov-Witten invariants in terms of the genus-0 data. We limit our considerations to the case of a projective line, whose Gromov-Witten invariants are well-known and easy to compute. We make some simple checks supporting his conjecture.Comment: 13 pages, no figures; v.2: new title, minor change

Wave packet transmission of Bloch electron manipulated by magnetic field

We study the phenomenon of wave packet revivals of Bloch electrons and explore how to control them by a magnetic field for quantum information transfer. It is showed that the single electron system can be modulated into a linear dispersion regime by the "quantized" flux and then an electronic wave packet with the components localized in this regime can be transferred without spreading. This feature can be utilized to perform the high-fidelity transfer of quantum information encoded in the polarization of the spin. Beyond the linear approximation, the re-localization and self-interference occur as the novel phenomena of quantum coherence.Comment: 6 pages, 5 figures, new content adde

On the Critical Behavior of D1-brane Theories

We study renormalization-group flow patterns in theories arising on D1-branes in various supersymmetry-breaking backgrounds. We argue that the theory of N D1-branes transverse to an orbifold space can be fine-tuned to flow to the corresponding orbifold conformal field theory in the infrared, for particular values of the couplings and theta angles which we determine using the discrete symmetries of the model. By calculating various nonplanar contributions to the scalar potential in the worldvolume theory, we show that fine-tuning is in fact required at finite N, as would be generically expected. We further comment on the presence of singular conformal field theories (such as those whose target space includes a ``throat'' described by an exactly solvable CFT) in the non-supersymmetric context. Throughout the analysis two applications are considered: to gauge theory/gravity duality and to linear sigma model techniques for studying worldsheet string theory.Comment: 23 pages in harvmac big, 8 figure