Non-linear interactions in a cosmological background in the DGP braneworld

We study quasi-static perturbations in a cosmological background in the Dvali-Gabadadze-Porrati (DGP) braneworld model. We identify the Vainshtein radius at which the non-linear interactions of the brane bending mode become important in a cosmological background. The Vainshtein radius in the early universe is much smaller than the one in the Minkowski background, but in a self-accelerating universe it is the same as the Minkowski background. Our result shows that the perturbative approach is applicable beyond the Vainshtein radius for weak gravity by taking into account the second order effects of the brane bending mode. The linearised cosmological perturbations are shown to be smoothly matched to the solutions inside the Vainshtein radius. We emphasize the importance of imposing a regularity condition in the bulk by solving the 5D perturbations and we highlight the problem of ad hoc assumptions on the bulk gravity that lead to different conclusions.Comment: 11 page

Empowering or Reinforcing Traditional Roles: Can CCTs Address Gender Vulnerabilities?

Most conditional cash transfer (CCT) programmes in Latin America select a woman as the primary recipient of the transfer. In most cases she is the mother of children in the household or the woman responsible for those children. The rationale behind this is that the money spent by women tends to be concentrated more on goods and services that are more likely to have a positive effect on the children?s well-being. (?)Empowering or Reinforcing Traditional Roles: Can CCTs Address Gender Vulnerabilities?

Reproducing the assembly of massive galaxies within the hierarchical cosmogony

In order to gain insight into the physical mechanisms leading to the formation of stars and their assembly in galaxies, we compare the predictions of the MOdel for the Rise of GAlaxies aNd Active nuclei (MORGANA) to the properties of K- and 850 micron-selected galaxies (such as number counts, redshift distributions and luminosity functions) by combining MORGANA with the spectrophotometric model GRASIL. We find that it is possible to reproduce the K- and 850 micron-band datasets at the same time and with a standard Salpeter IMF, and ascribe this success to our improved modeling of cooling in DM halos. We then predict that massively star-forming discs are common at z~2 and dominate the star-formation rate, but most of them merge with other galaxies within ~100 Myr. Our preferred model produces an overabundance of bright galaxies at z<1; this overabundance might be connected to the build-up of the diffuse stellar component in galaxy clusters, as suggested by Monaco et al. (2006), but a naive implementation of the mechanism suggested in that paper does not produce a sufficient slow-down of the evolution of these objects. Moreover, our model over-predicts the number of 10^{10}-10^{11} M_sun galaxies at z~1; this is a common behavior of theoretical models as shown by Fontana et al. (2006). These findings show that, while the overall build-up of the stellar mass is correctly reproduced by galaxy formation models, the ``downsizing'' trend of galaxies is not fully reproduced yet. This hints to some missing feedback mechanism in order to reproduce at the same time the formation of both the massive and the small galaxies.Comment: 14 pages; 11 figures; accepted for publication by MNRA

Equivalence checking for weak bi-Kleene algebra

Pomset automata are an operational model of weak bi-Kleene algebra, which describes programs that can fork an execution into parallel threads, upon completion of which execution can join to resume as a single thread. We characterize a fragment of pomset automata that admits a decision procedure for language equivalence. Furthermore, we prove that this fragment corresponds precisely to series-rational expressions, i.e., rational expressions with an additional operator for bounded parallelism. As a consequence, we obtain a new proof that equivalence of series-rational expressions is decidable