On the reduction of hypercubic lattice artifacts

This note presents a comparative study of various options to reduce the errors coming from the discretization of a Quantum Field Theory in a lattice with hypercubic symmetry. We show that it is possible to perform an extrapolation towards the continuum which is able to eliminate systematically the artifacts which break the O(4) symmetry.Comment: 15 pages. 4 figures. Minor changes (Appendix and refs added

Mission: Impossible (Escape from the Lyman Limit)

We investigate the intrinsic opacity of high-redshift galaxies to outgoing ionising photons using high-quality photometry of a sample of 27 spectroscopically-identified galaxies of redshift 1.9<z<3.5 in the Hubble Deep Field. Our measurement is based on maximum-likelihood fitting of model galaxy spectral energy distributions-including the effects of intrinsic Lyman-limit absorption and random realizations of intervening Lyman-series and Lyman-limit absorption-to photometry of galaxies from space- and ground-based broad-band images. Our method provides several important advantages over the methods used by previous groups, including most importantly that two-dimensional sky subtraction of faint-galaxy images is more robust than one-dimensional sky subtraction of faint-galaxy spectra. We find at the 3sigma statistical confidence level that on average no more than 4% of the ionising photons escape galaxies of redshift 1.9<z<3.5. This result is consistent with observations of low- and moderate-redshift galaxies but is in direct contradiction to a recent result based on medium-resolution spectroscopy of high-redshift (z~3) galaxies. Dividing our sample in subsamples according to luminosity, intrinsic ultraviolet colour, and redshift, we find no evidence for selection effects that could explain such discrepancy. Even when all systematic effects are included, the data could not realistically accomodate any escape fraction value larger than ~15%.Comment: Accepted for publication in Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society. 8 pages, 4 b/w figures, MNRAS styl

Effect of the nearby levels on the resonance fluorescence spectrum of the atom-field interaction

We study the resonance fluorescence in the Jaynes-Cummings model when nearby levels are taking into account. We show that the Stark shift produced by such levels generates a displacement of the peaks of the resonance fluorescence due to an induced effective detuning and also induces an asymmetry. Specific results are presented assuming a coherent and a thermal fields