Effective Field Theory for Inflation

The methods of effective field theory are used to study generic theories of inflation with a single inflaton field. For scalar modes, the leading corrections to the ${\cal R}$ correlation function are found to be purely of the $k$-inflation type. For tensor modes the leading corrections to the correlation function arise from terms in the action that are quadratic in the curvature, including a parity-violating term that makes the propagation of these modes depend on their helicity. These methods are also briefly applied to non-generic theories of inflation with an extra shift symmetry, as in so-called ghost inflation.Comment: 14 pages, Latex, references added and minor additions and corrections mad

On the Creation of the Universe out of Nothing

We explain how the Universe was created with no expenditure of energy or initial mass.Comment: To be presented at IWARA 2009 (4th International Workshop on Astronomy and Relativistic Astrophysics), to be held in Brazil, October 200

Note on the thermal history of decoupled massive particles

This note provides an alternative approach to the momentum decay and thermal evolution of decoupled massive particles. Although the ingredients in our results have been addressed in Ref.\cite{Weinberg}, the strategies employed here are simpler, and the results obtained here are more general.Comment: JHEP style, 4 pages, to appear in CQ

Quantum electrodynamics for vector mesons

Quantum electrodynamics for $\rho$ mesons is considered. It is shown that, at tree level, the value of the gyromagnetic ratio of the $\rho^+$ is fixed to 2 in a self-consistent effective quantum field theory. Further, the mixing parameter of the photon and the neutral vector meson is equal to the ratio of electromagnetic and strong couplings, leading to the mass difference $M_{\rho^0}-M_{\rho^\pm}\sim 1 {\rm MeV}$ at tree order.Comment: 4 pages, 2 figures, REVTeX 4, accepted for publication in PR

Asymptotically Safe Lorentzian Gravity

The gravitational asymptotic safety program strives for a consistent and predictive quantum theory of gravity based on a non-trivial ultraviolet fixed point of the renormalization group (RG) flow. We investigate this scenario by employing a novel functional renormalization group equation which takes the causal structure of space-time into account and connects the RG flows for Euclidean and Lorentzian signature by a Wick-rotation. Within the Einstein-Hilbert approximation, the $\beta$-functions of both signatures exhibit ultraviolet fixed points in agreement with asymptotic safety. Surprisingly, the two fixed points have strikingly similar characteristics, suggesting that Euclidean and Lorentzian quantum gravity belong to the same universality class at high energies.Comment: 4 pages, 2 figure

Low Energy Constants from High Energy Theorems

New constraints on resonance saturation in chiral perturbation theory are investigated. These constraints arise because each consistent saturation scheme must map to a representation of the full QCD chiral symmetry group. The low-energy constants of chiral perturbation theory are then related by a set of mixing angles. It is shown that vector meson dominance is a consequence of the fact that nature has chosen the lowest-dimensional nontrivial chiral representation. It is further shown that chiral symmetry places an upper bound on the mass of the lightest scalar in the hadron spectrum.Comment: 11 pages TeX and mtexsis.te

What is the Discrete Gauge Symmetry of the MSSM?

We systematically study the extension of the Supersymmetric Standard Model (SSM) by an anomaly-free discrete gauge symmetry Z_N. We extend the work of Ibanez and Ross with N=2,3 to arbitrary values of N. As new fundamental symmetries, we find four Z_6, nine Z_9 and nine Z_18. We then place three phenomenological demands upon the low-energy effective SSM: (i) the presence of the mu-term in the superpotential, (ii) baryon-number conservation upto dimension-five operators, and (iii) the presence of the see-saw neutrino mass term LHLH. We are then left with only two anomaly-free discrete gauge symmetries: baryon-triality, B_3, and a new Z_6, which we call proton-hexality, P_6. Unlike B_3, P_6 prohibits the dimension-four lepton-number violating operators. This we propose as the discrete gauge symmetry of the Minimal SSM, instead of R-parity.Comment: Typo in item 2 below Eq.(6.9) corrected (wrong factor of "3"); 27 pages, 5 table

Revenue Maximization and Ex-Post Budget Constraints

We consider the problem of a revenue-maximizing seller with m items for sale to n additive bidders with hard budget constraints, assuming that the seller has some prior distribution over bidder values and budgets. The prior may be correlated across items and budgets of the same bidder, but is assumed independent across bidders. We target mechanisms that are Bayesian Incentive Compatible, but that are ex-post Individually Rational and ex-post budget respecting. Virtually no such mechanisms are known that satisfy all these conditions and guarantee any revenue approximation, even with just a single item. We provide a computationally efficient mechanism that is a $3$-approximation with respect to all BIC, ex-post IR, and ex-post budget respecting mechanisms. Note that the problem is NP-hard to approximate better than a factor of 16/15, even in the case where the prior is a point mass \cite{ChakrabartyGoel}. We further characterize the optimal mechanism in this setting, showing that it can be interpreted as a distribution over virtual welfare maximizers. We prove our results by making use of a black-box reduction from mechanism to algorithm design developed by \cite{CaiDW13b}. Our main technical contribution is a computationally efficient $3$-approximation algorithm for the algorithmic problem that results by an application of their framework to this problem. The algorithmic problem has a mixed-sign objective and is NP-hard to optimize exactly, so it is surprising that a computationally efficient approximation is possible at all. In the case of a single item ($m=1$), the algorithmic problem can be solved exactly via exhaustive search, leading to a computationally efficient exact algorithm and a stronger characterization of the optimal mechanism as a distribution over virtual value maximizers

Electromagnetic processes in a χ\chiEFT framework

Recently, we have derived a two--nucleon potential and consistent nuclear electromagnetic currents in chiral effective field theory with pions and nucleons as explicit degrees of freedom. The calculation of the currents has been carried out to include N$^3$LO corrections, consisting of two--pion exchange and contact contributions. The latter involve unknown low-energy constants (LECs), some of which have been fixed by fitting the $np$ S- and P-wave phase shifts up to 100 MeV lab energies. The remaining LECs entering the current operator are determined so as to reproduce the experimental deuteron and trinucleon magnetic moments, as well as the $np$ cross section. This electromagnetic current operator is utilized to study the $nd$ and $n^3$He radiative captures at thermal neutron energies. Here we discuss our results stressing on the important role played by the LECs in reproducing the experimental data.Comment: Invited talk at the 5th International Conference on Quarks and Nuclear Physics, to appear in Chinese Physics

Non-Gaussian Correlations Outside the Horizon

It is shown that under essentially all conditions, the non-linear classical equations governing gravitation and matter in cosmology have a solution in which far outside the horizon in a suitable gauge the reduced spatial metric (the spatial metric divided by the square of the Robertson--Walker scale factor $a$) is time-independent, though with an arbitrary dependence on co-moving coordinates, and all perturbations to the other metric components and to all matter variables vanish, to leading order in $1/a$. The corrections are of order $1/a^2$, and are explicitly given for the reduced metric in a multifield model with a general potential. Further, this is the solution that describes the metric and matter produced by single-field inflation. These results justify the use of observed non-Gaussian correlations (or their absence) as a test of theories of single-field inflation, despite our ignorance of the constituents of the universe while fluctuations are outside the horizon after inflation, as long as graphs with loops can be neglected.Comment: 25 pages. This version clarifies the scale transformation used in Section II and the gauge transformation used in Section III, and corrects some typos, including new typos introduced in version