The Pornography Report: Epistemology, Methodology and Ideology

In a summary section of The Report of the Commission on Obscenity and Pornography, my colleagues and I wrote that . . . persons who are unfamiliar with erotic materials may experience strong and conflicting emotional reactions when first exposed to sexual stimuli. Multiple responses, such as attraction and repulsion to an unfamiliar object, are commonly observed in the research literature on psychosensory stimulation from a variety of nonsexual as well as sexual stimuli. \u27 It may be ironic (but not unpredictable) that the Report we were writing would subsequently generate similarly strong and conflicting emotional responses, for the same reasons: it is so unfamiliar. As I review available evidence concerning the impact of the Report, I detect strength, emotion, repulsion and attraction. And, as in the area of human sexuality, there is considerable misunderstanding

Starting a UAS program

This presentation provides an overview of how to start using unmanned aerial systems from a legal perspective. As UAS become more commonplace and their use expands beyond traditional aviation companies, there is a need for operators to know how to use these vehicles safely and legally. Topics covered include current FAA regulations, operator requirements, vehicle airworthiness, and liability concerns

Hawking Radiation in the Ghost Condensate is Non-Thermal

We consider a Schwarzschild black hole immersed in a ghost condensate background. It is shown that the Hawking radiation in the quanta of small perturbations around this background is highly suppressed- in particular it is not given by a thermal spectrum. This result is in accord with observations that such black holes can be used to violate the generalized second law of thermodynamics, and thus cannot have a standard entropy/area relation.Comment: 26 pages; v2: reference added, missing Christoffel symbols included in appendix, minor typos corrected in equations (39) and (50

Behavior of logarithmic branch cuts in the self-energy of gluons at finite temperature

We give a simple argument for the cancellation of the log(-k^2) terms (k is the gluon momentum) between the zero-temperature and the temperature-dependent parts of the thermal self-energy.Comment: 4 page

Gauge Independence of Limiting Cases of One-Loop Electron Dispersion Relation in High-Temperature QED

Assuming high temperature and taking subleading temperature dependence into account, gauge dependence of one-loop electron dispersion relation is investigated in massless QED at zero chemical potential. The analysis is carried out using a general linear covariant gauge. The equation governing the gauge dependence of the dispersion relation is obtained and used to prove that the dispersion relation is gauge independent in the limiting case of momenta much larger than $eT$. It is also shown that the effective mass is not influenced by the leading temperature dependence of the gauge dependent part of the effective self-energy. As a result the effective mass, which is of order $eT$, does not receive a correction of order $e^2T$ from one loop, independent of the gauge parameter.Comment: Revised and enlarged version, 14 pages, Revte

Thermal quark production in ultra-relativistic nuclear collisions

We calculate thermal production of u, d, s, c and b quarks in ultra-relativistic heavy ion collisions. The following processes are taken into account: thermal gluon decay (g to ibar i), gluon fusion (g g to ibar i), and quark-antiquark annihilation (jbar j to ibar i), where i and j represent quark species. We use the thermal quark masses, $m_i^2(T)\simeq m_i^2 + (2g^2/9)T^2$, in all the rates. At small mass ($m_i(T)<2T$), the production is largely dominated by the thermal gluon decay channel. We obtain numerical and analytic solutions of one-dimensional hydrodynamic expansion of an initially pure glue plasma. Our results show that even in a quite optimistic scenario, all quarks are far from chemical equilibrium throughout the expansion. Thermal production of light quarks (u, d and s) is nearly independent of species. Heavy quark (c and b) production is quite independent of the transition temperature and could serve as a very good probe of the initial temperature. Thermal quark production measurements could also be used to determine the gluon damping rate, or equivalently the magnetic mass.Comment: 14 pages (latex) plus 6 figures (uuencoded postscript files); CERN-TH.7038/9

Quasiparticle picture of quarks near chiral transition at finite temperature

We investigate, using a chiral effective model, the quark spectrum in the critical region of the chiral transition focusing on the effect of the possible mesonic excitations in the quark-gluon plasma phase. We find that there appears a novel three-peak structure in the quark spectra. We elucidate the mechanism of the appearance of the multi-peak structure with the help of a Yukawa model with an elementary boson.Comment: 4 pages, 5 eps figures, to appear in the proceedings of International Conference on Strong & Electroweak Matter 2006, Brookhaven National Laboratory, USA, May 10-13, 200

The Boltzmann Equation in Scalar Field Theory

We derive the classical transport equation, in scalar field theory with a V(phi) interaction, from the equation of motion for the quantum field. We obtain a very simple, but iterative, expression for the effective action which generates all the n-point Green functions in the high-temperature limit. An explicit closed form is given in the static case.Comment: 10 pages, using RevTeX (corrected TeX misprints

Light-front Schwinger Model at Finite Temperature

We study the light-front Schwinger model at finite temperature following the recent proposal in \cite{alves}. We show that the calculations are carried out efficiently by working with the full propagator for the fermion, which also avoids subtleties that arise with light-front regularizations. We demonstrate this with the calculation of the zero temperature anomaly. We show that temperature dependent corrections to the anomaly vanish, consistent with the results from the calculations in the conventional quantization. The gauge self-energy is seen to have the expected non-analytic behavior at finite temperature, but does not quite coincide with the conventional results. However, the two structures are exactly the same on-shell. We show that temperature does not modify the bound state equations and that the fermion condensate has the same behavior at finite temperature as that obtained in the conventional quantization.Comment: 10 pages, one figure, version to be published in Phys. Rev.

The graviton self-energy in thermal quantum gravity

We show generally that in thermal gravity, the one-particle irreducible 2-point function depends on the choice of the basic graviton fields. We derive the relevant properties of a physical graviton self-energy, which is independent of the parametrization of the graviton field. An explicit expression for the graviton self-energy at high-temperature is given to one-loop order.Comment: 13 pages, 2 figure