What is an elementary particle?

Schrödinger discusses what an elementary particle is. This essay originally appeared in the journal Endeavour

Einstein's Boxes

At the 1927 Solvay conference, Einstein presented a thought experiment intended to demonstrate the incompleteness of the quantum mechanical description of reality. In the following years, the thought experiment was picked up and modified by Einstein, de Broglie, and several other commentators into a simple scenario involving the splitting in half of the wave function of a single particle in a box. In this paper we collect together several formulations of this thought experiment from the existing literature; analyze and assess it from the point of view of the Einstein-Bohr debates, the EPR dilemma, and Bell's theorem; and generally lobby for Einstein's Boxes taking its rightful place alongside similar but historically better-known quantum mechanical thought experiments such as EPR and Schroedinger's Cat.Comment: Published versio

Gauge theories on noncommutative euclidean spaces

We consider gauge theories on noncommutative euclidean space . In particular, we discuss the structure of gauge group following standard mathematical definitions and using the ideas of hep-th/0102182.Comment: Corrections made, references adde

Compact Kac algebras and commuting squares

We consider commuting squares of finite dimensional von Neumann algebras having the algebra of complex numbers in the lower left corner. Examples include the vertex models, the spin models (in the sense of subfactor theory) and the commuting squares associated to finite dimensional Kac algebras. To any such commuting square we associate a compact Kac algebra and we compute the corresponding subfactor and its standard invariant in terms of it.Comment: 14 pages, some minor change

Infinite random matrices and ergodic measures

We introduce and study a 2-parameter family of unitarily invariant probability measures on the space of infinite Hermitian matrices. We show that the decomposition of a measure from this family on ergodic components is described by a determinantal point process on the real line. The correlation kernel for this process is explicitly computed. At certain values of parameters the kernel turns into the well-known sine kernel which describes the local correlation in Circular and Gaussian Unitary Ensembles. Thus, the random point configuration of the sine process is interpreted as the random set of ``eigenvalues'' of infinite Hermitian matrices distributed according to the corresponding measure.Comment: 36 page

Deformation Theory of Infinity Algebras

This work explores the deformation theory of algebraic structures in a very general setting. These structures include commutative, associative algebras, Lie algebras, and the infinity versions of these structures, the strongly homotopy associative and Lie algebras. In all these cases the algebra structure is determined by an element of a certain graded Lie algebra which plays the role of a differential on this algebra. We work out the deformation theory in terms of the Lie algebra of coderivations of an appropriate coalgebra structure and construct a universal infinitesimal deformation as well as a miniversal formal deformation. By working at this level of generality, the main ideas involved in deformation theory stand out more clearly.Comment: 31 pages, LaTeX2