The attractor mechanism as a distillation procedure

In a recent paper it has been shown that for double extremal static spherically symmetric BPS black hole solutions in the STU model the well-known process of moduli stabilization at the horizon can be recast in a form of a distillation procedure of a three-qubit entangled state of GHZ-type. By studying the full flow in moduli space in this paper we investigate this distillation procedure in more detail. We introduce a three-qubit state with amplitudes depending on the conserved charges the warp factor, and the moduli. We show that for the recently discovered non-BPS solutions it is possible to see how the distillation procedure unfolds itself as we approach the horizon. For the non-BPS seed solutions at the asymptotically Minkowski region we are starting with a three-qubit state having seven nonequal nonvanishing amplitudes and finally at the horizon we get a GHZ state with merely four nonvanishing ones with equal magnitudes. The magnitude of the surviving nonvanishing amplitudes is proportional to the macroscopic black hole entropy. A systematic study of such attractor states shows that their properties reflect the structure of the fake superpotential. We also demonstrate that when starting with the very special values for the moduli corresponding to flat directions the uniform structure at the horizon deteriorates due to errors generalizing the usual bit flips acting on the qubits of the attractor states.Comment: 38 pages LaTe

Spectral Templates from Multicolor Redshift Surveys

Understanding how the physical properties of galaxies (e.g. their spectral type or age) evolve as a function of redshift relies on having an accurate representation of galaxy spectral energy distributions. While it has been known for some time that galaxy spectra can be reconstructed from a handful of orthogonal basis templates, the underlying basis is poorly constrained. The limiting factor has been the lack of large samples of galaxies (covering a wide range in spectral type) with high signal-to-noise spectrophotometric observations. To alleviate this problem we introduce here a new technique for reconstructing galaxy spectral energy distributions directly from samples of galaxies with broadband photometric data and spectroscopic redshifts. Exploiting the statistical approach of the Karhunen-Loeve expansion, our iterative training procedure increasingly improves the eigenbasis, so that it provides better agreement with the photometry. We demonstrate the utility of this approach by applying these improved spectral energy distributions to the estimation of photometric redshifts for the HDF sample of galaxies. We find that in a small number of iterations the dispersion in the photometric redshifts estimator (a comparison between predicted and measured redshifts) can decrease by up to a factor of 2.Comment: 25 pages, 9 figures, LaTeX AASTeX, accepted for publication in A

Galaxy Zoo : Building the low-mass end of the red sequence with local post-starburst galaxies

We present a study of local post-starburst galaxies (PSGs) using the photometric and spectroscopic observations from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey and the results from the Galaxy Zoo project. We find that the majority of our local PSG population have neither early- nor late-type morphologies but occupy a well-defined space within the colour-stellar mass diagram, most notably, the low-mass end of the 'green valley' below the transition mass thought to be the mass division between low-mass star-forming galaxies and high-mass passively evolving bulge-dominated galaxies. Our analysis suggests that it is likely that local PSGs will quickly transform into 'red', low-mass early-type galaxies as the stellar morphologies of the 'green' PSGs largely resemble that of the early-type galaxies within the same mass range. We propose that the current population of PSGs represents a population of galaxies which is rapidly transitioning between the star-forming and the passively evolving phases. Subsequently, these PSGs will contribute towards the build-up of the low-mass end of the 'red sequence' once the current population of young stars fade and stars are no longer being formed. These results are consistent with the idea of 'downsizing' where the build-up of smaller galaxies occurs at later epochs.Peer reviewe