Is Sustainable Development of Deserts Feasible?

Hot deserts that presently cover about one-fifth of the land area of our planet are rapidly devouring more and more arable lands mostly due to anthropogenic causes. We propose an interdisciplinary approach to revitalizing and commercializing hot deserts, which is based on systems thinking and Russian and NASA space technology experience in designing life-support systems for long-duration flights. We formulate ten principles for the design of sustainable life support systems in deserts, which can make the development of the deserts feasible. It is discussed how the principles can be employed to design and operate desert’s eco-industrial parks with greenhouses in which the transpired and evaporated moisture is collected and condensed. The potential benefits of setting up the eco-industrial parks in deserts include the slowdown and eventual reversal of the desertification trend, the migration of many industrial production facilities from mild-climate regions to deserts, the increased availability of potable water and food in deserts, the development of poor African countries, and the emergence of new investment markets

Dispersive evaluation of the D-term form factor in deeply virtual Compton scattering

We present a dispersive representation of the D-term form factor for hard exclusive reactions, using unsubtracted $t$-channel dispersion relations. The $t$-channel unitarity relation is saturated with the contribution of two-pion intermediate states, using the two-pion distributions amplitude for the $\gamma^*\gamma\rightarrow \pi\pi$ subprocess and reconstructing the $\pi\pi\rightarrow N\bar N$ subprocess from available information on pion-nucleon partial-wave helicity amplitudes. Results for the D-term form factor as function of $t$ as well as at $t=0$ are discussed in comparison with available model predictions and phenomenological parametrizations.Comment: 8 pages, 3 figures; improved presentation of the results; version to appear in Phys. Lett.

Flavor asymmetry of polarized antiquark distributions and semi-inclusive DIS

The $1/N_c$-expansion of QCD suggests large flavor asymmetries of the polarized antiquark distributions in the nucleon. This is confirmed by model calculations in the large-$N_c$ limit (chiral quark-soliton model), which give sizable results for $\Delta\bar u (x) - \Delta\bar d (x)$ and $\Delta\bar u (x) + \Delta\bar d (x) - 2 \Delta \bar s (x)$. We compute the contributions of these flavor asymmetries to the spin asymmetries in hadron production in semi-inclusive deep-inelastic scattering. We show that the large flavor asymmetries predicted by the chiral quark-soliton model are consistent with the recent HERMES data for spin asymmetries in charged hadron production.Comment: 21 pages, LaTeX2e, 9 eps figures include

AdS/CFT correspondence via R-current correlation functions revisited

Motivated by realizing open/closed string duality in the work by Gopakumar [Phys. Rev. D70:025009,2004], we study two and three-point correlation functions of R-current vector fields in N=4 super Yang-Mills theory. These correlation functions in free field limit can be derived from the worldline formalism and written as heat kernel integrals in the position space. We show that reparametrizing these integrals converts them to the expected AdS supergravity results which are known in terms of bulk to boundary propagator. We expect that this reparametrization corresponds to transforming open string moduli parameterization to the closed string ones.Comment: 23 pages, v2: calculations clarified, references added, v3: sections re-arranged with more explanations, 4 figures and an appendix adde