Gold and Greater Britain: Jevons, Trollope, and Settler Colonialism

The Australian gold rushes of the 1850s provide an exemplary test case for exploring the impact of Greater Britain—the settler colonial empire—on the Victorian novel and political economy. British gold diggers’ nomadism operated in seeming antithesis to the colonies’ explosive growth, which posed a conceptual challenge both to political economy’s stadial model of societal development and to liberal narratives of labor and land—narratives that underpinned concepts of individual character and civil society. Informed by colonial writing and the experience of gold fields, W. S. Jevons’s Theory of Political Economy (1871) and Anthony Trollope’s John Caldigate (1879) reimagine metropolitan space and subjectivity in settler-colonial terms, helping lay the ground for a deterritorialized, global British identity

Strings after D-term inflation: evolution and properties of chiral cosmic strings

We motivate the study of chiral cosmic strings through a scenario of structure formation which mixes D-term inflation and strings. We then discuss some properties of chiral cosmic strings, and results regarding their evolution and possible cosmological consequences are presented.Comment: 4 pages, 2 figures. To appear in the proceedings of the CAPP2000 conference held at Verbier, Switzerland between july 17th and 28th, 200

Orbifold Riemann Surfaces and the Yang-Mills-Higgs Equations

We extend Hitchin's results on "The self-duality equations on a Riemann surface" (Proc. LMS (3), vol. 55, 1987) to orbifold Riemann surfaces. We prove existence results for orbifold solutions of the Yang-Mills-Higgs equations and construct the moduli space of solutions. These moduli spaces provide interesting examples of non-compact hyper-Kahler manifolds in all dimensions divisible by 4 and of completely integrable Hamiltonian systems. We also reinterpret these moduli spaces as spaces of orbifold Higgs bundles and as representation varieties of Fuchsian groups.Comment: Hard copies are available on request. This paper will appear in the "Annali della Scuola Normale Superiore di Pisa (classe di scienze)". LaTeX2.09 with AMS font

Testing and comparing tachyon inflation to single standard field inflation

We compare the standard single scalar field inflationary predictions with those of an inflationary phase driven by a tachyon field. A slow-roll formalism is defined for tachyon inflation and we derive the spectra of scalar and tensor perturbations as well as the consistency relations. At lowest order the predictions of standard and tachyon inflation are the same. Higher order deviations are present and their observational relevance is discussed. We discuss the observational consequences of some typical inflationary tachyon potentials and compare them with recent data. All the models predict a negative and very small running of the scalar spectral index, and they consistently lie within the 1$\sigma$ contour of the data set. However, the regime of blue scalar spectral index and large gravity waves is not explored by these models.Comment: Proceedings of the 10th Marcel Grossmann Meeting, Rio de Janeiro, July 2003, 6 pages, 1 figur

Translation invariant time-dependent solutions to massive gravity

Homogeneous time-dependent solutions of massive gravity generalise the plane wave solutions of the linearised Fierz-Pauli equations for a massive spin-two particle, as well as the Kasner solutions of General Relativity. We show that they also allow a clear counting of the degrees of freedom and represent a simplified framework to work out the constraints, the equations of motion and the initial value formulation. We work in the vielbein formulation of massive gravity, find the phase space resulting from the constraints and show that several disconnected sectors of solutions exist some of which are unstable. The initial values determine the sector to which a solution belongs. Classically, the theory is not pathological but quantum mechanically the theory may suffer from instabilities. The latter are not due to an extra ghost-like degree of freedom.Comment: 31 page