Nuclear waste disposal in space

Work on nuclear waste disposal in space conducted by the George C. Marshall Space Flight Center, National Aeronautics and Space Administration, and contractors are reported. From the aggregate studies, it is concluded that space disposal of nuclear waste is technically feasible

A simple proof of the recent generalisations of Hawking's black hole topology theorem

A key result in four dimensional black hole physics, since the early 1970s, is Hawking's topology theorem asserting that the cross-sections of an "apparent horizon", separating the black hole region from the rest of the spacetime, are topologically two-spheres. Later, during the 1990s, by applying a variant of Hawking's argument, Gibbons and Woolgar could also show the existence of a genus dependent lower bound for the entropy of topological black holes with negative cosmological constant. Recently Hawking's black hole topology theorem, along with the results of Gibbons and Woolgar, has been generalised to the case of black holes in higher dimensions. Our aim here is to give a simple self-contained proof of these generalisations which also makes their range of applicability transparent.Comment: 12 pages, 1 figur

The Cosmic Censor Forbids Naked Topology

For any asymptotically flat spacetime with a suitable causal structure obeying (a weak form of) Penrose's cosmic censorship conjecture and satisfying conditions guaranteeing focusing of complete null geodesics, we prove that active topological censorship holds. We do not assume global hyperbolicity, and therefore make no use of Cauchy surfaces and their topology. Instead, we replace this with two underlying assumptions concerning the causal structure: that no compact set can signal to arbitrarily small neighbourhoods of spatial infinity (``$i^0$-avoidance''), and that no future incomplete null geodesic is visible from future null infinity. We show that these and the focusing condition together imply that the domain of outer communications is simply connected. Furthermore, we prove lemmas which have as a consequence that if a future incomplete null geodesic were visible from infinity, then given our $i^0$-avoidance assumption, it would also be visible from points of spacetime that can communicate with infinity, and so would signify a true naked singularity.Comment: To appear in CQG, this improved version contains minor revisions to incorporate referee's suggestions. Two revised references. Plain TeX, 12 page

Rigid Singularity Theorem in Globally Hyperbolic Spacetimes

We show the rigid singularity theorem, that is, a globally hyperbolic spacetime satisfying the strong energy condition and containing past trapped sets, either is timelike geodesically incomplete or splits isometrically as space $\times$ time. This result is related to Yau's Lorentzian splitting conjecture.Comment: 3 pages, uses revtex.sty, to appear in Physical Review

Catahoula formation of the Texas Coastal Plain : origin, geochemical evolution, and characteristics of uranium deposits

UT Librarie

On the Gannon-Lee Singularity Theorem in Higher Dimensions

The Gannon-Lee singularity theorems give well-known restrictions on the spatial topology of singularity-free (i.e., nonspacelike geodesically complete), globally hyperbolic spacetimes. In this paper, we revisit these classic results in the light of recent developments, especially the failure in higher dimensions of a celebrated theorem by Hawking on the topology of black hole horizons. The global hyperbolicity requirement is weakened, and we expand the scope of the main results to allow for the richer variety of spatial topologies which are likely to occur in higher-dimensional spacetimes.Comment: 13 pages, no figures, to appear in Class. Quantum Gra

A uniqueness theorem for the adS soliton

The stability of physical systems depends on the existence of a state of least energy. In gravity, this is guaranteed by the positive energy theorem. For topological reasons this fails for nonsupersymmetric Kaluza-Klein compactifications, which can decay to arbitrarily negative energy. For related reasons, this also fails for the AdS soliton, a globally static, asymptotically toroidal $\Lambda<0$ spacetime with negative mass. Nonetheless, arguing from the AdS/CFT correspondence, Horowitz and Myers (hep-th/9808079) proposed a new positive energy conjecture, which asserts that the AdS soliton is the unique state of least energy in its asymptotic class. We give a new structure theorem for static $\Lambda<0$ spacetimes and use it to prove uniqueness of the AdS soliton. Our results offer significant support for the new positive energy conjecture and add to the body of rigorous results inspired by the AdS/CFT correspondence.Comment: Revtex, 4 pages; Matches published version. More detail in Abstract and one equation corrected. For details of proofs and further results, see hep-th/020408

Accreting millisecond X-ray pulsars: 10 years of INTEGRAL observations

During the last 10 years, INTEGRAL made a unique contribution to the study of accreting millisecond X-ray pulsars (AMXPs), discovering three of the 14 sources now known of this class. Besides increasing the number of known AMXPs, INTEGRAL also carried out observations of these objects above 20 keV, substantially advancing our understanding of their behaviour. We present here a review of all the AMXPs observed with INTEGRAL and discuss the physical interpretation of their behaviour in the X-ray domain. We focus in particular on the lightcurve profile during outburst, as well as the timing, spectral, and thermonuclear type-I X-ray bursts properties.Comment: 8 pages, 8 figures. Proceedings of "An INTEGRAL view of the high-energy sky (the first 10 years)" the 9th INTEGRAL Workshop, October 15-19, 2012, Paris, Franc

Myers' type theorems and some related oscillation results

In this paper we study the behavior of solutions of a second order differential equation. The existence of a zero and its localization allow us to get some compactness results. In particular we obtain a Myers' type theorem even in the presence of an amount of negative curvature. The technique we use also applies to the study of spectral properties of Schroedinger operators on complete manifolds.Comment: 16 page