Quantum Fields on the Light Front, Formulation in Coordinates close to the Light Front, Lattice Approximation

We review the fundamental ideas of quantizing a theory on a Light Front including the Hamiltonian approach to the problem of bound states on the Light Front and the limiting transition from formulating a theory in Lorentzian coordinates (where the quantization occurs on spacelike hyperplanes) to the theory on the Light Front, which demonstrates the equivalence of these variants of the theory. We describe attempts to find such a form of the limiting transition for gauge theories on the Wilson lattice.Comment: LaTeX 2e, 14 page

Calculation of the Mass Spectrum of QED-2 in Light-Front Coordinates

With the aim of a further investigation of the nonperturbative Hamiltonian approach in gauge field theories, the mass spectrum of QED-2 is calculated numerically by using the corrected Hamiltonian that was constructed previously for this theory on the light front. The calculations are performed for a wide range of the ratio of the fermion mass to the fermion charge at all values of the parameter \hat\theta related to the vacuum angle \theta. The results obtained in this way are compared with the results of known numerical calculations on a lattice in Lorentz coordinates. A method is proposed for extrapolating the values obtained within the infrared-regularized theory to the limit where the regularization is removed. The resulting spectrum agrees well with the known results in the case of \theta=0; in the case of \theta=\pi, there is agreement at small values of the fermion mass (below the phase-transition point).Comment: LaTex 2.09, 20 pages, 7 figures. New improved expression for the effective LF Hamiltonian was adde

Recent radiation in a marine and freshwater dinoflagellate species flock.

Processes of rapid radiation among unicellular eukaryotes are much less studied than among multicellular organisms. We have investigated a lineage of cold-water microeukaryotes (protists) that appear to have diverged recently. This lineage stands in stark contrast to known examples of phylogenetically closely related protists, in which genetic difference is typically larger than morphological differences. We found that the group not only consists of the marine-brackish dinoflagellate species Scrippsiella hangoei and the freshwater species Peridinium aciculiferum as discovered previously but also of a whole species flock. The additional species include Peridinium euryceps and Peridinium baicalense, which are restricted to a few lakes, in particular to the ancient Lake Baikal, Russia, and freshwater S. hangoei from Lake Baikal. These species are characterized by relatively large conspicuous morphological differences, which have given rise to the different species descriptions. However, our scanning electron microscopic studies indicate that they belong to a single genus according to traditional morphological characterization of dinoflagellates (thecal plate patterns). Moreover, we found that they have identical SSU (small subunit) rDNA fragments and distinct but very small differences in the DNA markers LSU (large subunit) rDNA, ITS2 (internal transcribed spacer 2) and COB (cytochrome b) gene, which are used to delineate dinoflagellates species. As some of the species co-occur, and all four have small but species-specific sequence differences, we suggest that these taxa are not a case of phenotypic plasticity but originated via recent adaptive radiation. We propose that this is the first clear example among free-living microeukaryotes of recent rapid diversification into several species followed by dispersion to environments with different ecological conditions.The ISME Journal advance online publication, 20 January 2015; doi:10.1038/ismej.2014.267