Higher-Dimensional Bulk Wormholes and their Manifestations in Brane Worlds

There is nothing to prevent a higher-dimensional anti-de Sitter bulk spacetime from containing various other branes in addition to hosting our universe, presumed to be a positive-tension 3-brane. In particular, it could contain closed, microscopic branes that form the boundary surfaces of void bubbles and thus violate the null energy condition in the bulk. The possible existence of such micro branes can be investigated by considering the properties of the ground state of a pseudo-Wheeler-DeWitt equation describing brane quantum dynamics in minisuperspace. If they exist, a concentration of these micro branes could act as a fluid of exotic matter able to support macroscopic wormholes connecting otherwise distant regions of the bulk. Were the brane constituting our universe to expand into a region of the bulk containing such higher-dimensional macroscopic wormholes, they would likely manifest themselves in our brane as wormholes of normal dimensionality, whose spontaneous appearance and general dynamics would seem inexplicably peculiar. This encounter could also result in the formation of baby universes of a particular type.Comment: 21 pages, 1 figur

On local Fourier analysis of multigrid methods for PDEs with jumping and random coefficients

In this paper, we propose a novel non-standard Local Fourier Analysis (LFA) variant for accurately predicting the multigrid convergence of problems with random and jumping coefficients. This LFA method is based on a specific basis of the Fourier space rather than the commonly used Fourier modes. To show the utility of this analysis, we consider, as an example, a simple cell-centered multigrid method for solving a steady-state single phase flow problem in a random porous medium. We successfully demonstrate the prediction capability of the proposed LFA using a number of challenging benchmark problems. The information provided by this analysis helps us to estimate a-priori the time needed for solving certain uncertainty quantification problems by means of a multigrid multilevel Monte Carlo method

Parity-violating 3-jet observables for massive quarks to order alphas^2 in e+e- annihilation

In this talk we discuss the calculation of the QCD corrections to parity-violating 3-jet observables in e^+e^- collisions, keeping the full quark mass dependence.Comment: 5 pages, Talk given at International Euroconference in Quantum Chromodynamics: 15 Years of the QCD - Montpellier Conference (QCD 00), Montpellier, France, 6-12 Jul 200