Henry Simons and the Other Minsky Moment

This paper examines the influence of Henry Simons on Hyman Minsky. Simons' proposals for banking reform are contrasted with Minsky's alternative 'big bank' and 'big government' programme for stabilising the economy. The paper concludes by arguing that Simons' proposals for stabilising banking would have prevented a credit bubble, but would not avoid economic instability. Nevertheless, Minsky remained an admirer of Simons’ ‘banking’ approach to the study of capitalism

Deligne-Beilinson cohomology and abelian link invariants: torsion case

For the abelian Chern-Simons field theory, we consider the quantum functional integration over the Deligne-Beilinson cohomology classes and present an explicit path-integral non-perturbative computation of the Chern-Simons link invariants in $SO(3)\simeq\mathbb{R}P^3$, a toy example of 3-manifold with torsion

Comment on the ``θ\theta-term renormalization in the (2+1)-dimensional CPN−1CP^{N-1} model with θ\theta term''

It is found that the recently published first coefficient of nonzero $\beta$-function for the Chern-Simons term in the $1/N$ expansion of the $CP^{N-1}$ model is untrue numerically. The correct result is given. The main conclusions of Park's paper are not changed.Comment: 3 pages, LATE

Note on Self-Duality and the Kodama State

An interesting interplay between self-duality, the Kodama (Chern-Simons) state and knot invariants is shown to emerge in the quantum theory of an Abelian gauge theory. More precisely, when a self-dual representation of the CCR is chosen, the corresponding vacuum in the Schroedinger representation is precisely given by the Kodama state. Several consequences of this construction are explored.Comment: 4 pages, no figures. References and discussion added. Final version to appear in PR

On asymmetric Chern-Simons number diffusion

We show that CP-violation can lead to an asymmetric diffusion of the Chern-Simons number in thermal equilibrium. This asymmetry leads to a linearly growing expectation value of the third power of the Chern-Simons number. In the long-time limit all expectation values of powers of Chern-Simon numbers are determined by their appropriate disconnected parts.Comment: 5 pages, contribution to the proceedings of SEWM 200

Self-dual solitons in N=2 supersymmetric semilocal Chern-Simons theory

We embed the semilocal Chern-Simons-Higgs theory into an N=2 supersymmetric system. We construct the corresponding conserved supercharges and derive the Bogomol'nyi equations of the model from supersymmetry considerations. We show that these equations hold provided certain conditions on the coupling constants as well as on the Higgs potential of the system, which are a consequence of the huge symmetry of the theory, are satisfied. They admit string-like solutions which break one half of the supersymmetries --BPS Chern-Simons semilocal cosmic strings-- whose magnetic flux is concentrated at the center of the vortex. We study such solutions and show that their stability is provided by supersymmetry through the existence of a lower bound for the energy, even though the manifold of the Higgs vacuum does not contain non-contractible loops.Comment: 12 pages, LaTeX, no figures, to appear in Modern Physics Letters