PP-waves with torsion and metric-affine gravity

A classical pp-wave is a 4-dimensional Lorentzian spacetime which admits a nonvanishing parallel spinor field; here the connection is assumed to be Levi-Civita. We generalise this definition to metric compatible spacetimes with torsion and describe basic properties of such spacetimes. We use our generalised pp-waves for constructing new explicit vacuum solutions of quadratic metric-affine gravity.Comment: 17 pages, LaTeX2

CONSENSUS APPROACH IN QSAR

24-2

Prototype 9.7 m Schwarzschild-Couder telescope for the Cherenkov Telescope Array: status of the optical system

The Cherenkov Telescope Array (CTA) is an international project for a next-generation ground-based gamma ray observatory, aiming to improve on the sensitivity of current-generation experiments by an order of magnitude and provide energy coverage from 30 GeV to more than 300 TeV. The 9.7m Schwarzschild-Couder (SC) candidate medium-size telescope for CTA exploits a novel aplanatic two-mirror optical design that provides a large field of view of 8 degrees and substantially improves the off-axis performance giving better angular resolution across all of the field of view with respect to single-mirror telescopes. The realization of the SC optical design implies the challenging production of large aspherical mirrors accompanied by a submillimeter-precision custom alignment system. In this contribution we report on the status of the implementation of the optical system on a prototype 9.7 m SC telescope located at the Fred Lawrence Whipple Observatory in southern Arizona.Comment: Proceedings of the 35th International Cosmic Ray Conference (ICRC 2017), Busan, Korea. All CTA contributions at arXiv:1709.0348

Link Invariants and Combinatorial Quantization of Hamiltonian Chern-Simons Theory

We define and study the properties of observables associated to any link in $\Sigma\times {\bf R}$ (where $\Sigma$ is a compact surface) using the combinatorial quantization of hamiltonian Chern-Simons theory. These observables are traces of holonomies in a non commutative Yang-Mills theory where the gauge symmetry is ensured by a quantum group. We show that these observables are link invariants taking values in a non commutative algebra, the so called Moduli Algebra. When $\Sigma=S^2$ these link invariants are pure numbers and are equal to Reshetikhin-Turaev link invariants.Comment: 39, latex, 7 figure