Quasiconformality and mass

We identify universal quasiconformal (walking) behaviour in non-Abelian gauge field theories based on the mass-dependent all-order beta-function introduced in arXiv:0908.1364. We find different types of walking behaviour in the presence of (partially) massive species. We employ our findings to the construction of candidate theories for dynamical electroweak symmetry breaking by walking technicolour.Comment: 16 pages, 8 figures

SELF-DUAL SUPERGRAVITIES

The N-extended supersymmetric self-dual Poincar\'e supergravity equations provide a natural local description of supermanifolds possessing hyperk\"ahler structure. These equations admit an economical formulation in chiral superspace. A reformulation in harmonic superspace encodes self-dual supervielbeins and superconnections in a graded skew-symmetric supermatrix superfield prepotential satisfying generalised Cauchy-Riemann conditions. A recipe is presented for extracting explicit self-dual supervielbeins and superconnections from such `analytic' prepotentials. We demonstrate the method by explicitly decoding a simple example of superfield prepotential, analogous to that corresponding to the Taub-NUT solution. The superspace we thus construct is an interesting $N=2$ supersymmetric deformation of flat space, having flat `body' and constant curvature `soul'.Comment: 14 pages, latex fil

A Characteristic Planetary Feature in Double-Peaked, High-Magnification Microlensing Events

A significant fraction of microlensing planets have been discovered in high-magnification events, and a significant fraction of these events exhibit a double-peak structure at their peak. However, very wide or very close binaries can also produce double-peaked high-magnification events, with the same gross properties as those produced by planets. Traditionally, distinguishing between these two interpretations has relied upon detailed modeling, which is both time-consuming and generally does not provide insight into the observable properties that allow discrimination between these two classes of models. We study the morphologies of these two classes of double-peaked high-magnification events, and identify a simple diagnostic that can be used to immediately distinguish between perturbations caused by planetary and binary companions, without detailed modeling. This diagnostic is based on the difference in the shape of the intra-peak region of the light curves. The shape is smooth and concave for binary lensing, while it tends to be either boxy or convex for planetary lensing. In planetary lensing this intra-peak morphology is due to the small, weak cusp of the planetary central caustic located between the two stronger cusps. We apply this diagnostic to five observed double-peaked high-magnification events to infer their underlying nature. A corollary of our study is that good coverage of the intra-peak region of double-peaked high-magnification events is likely to be important for their unique interpretation.Comment: 6 pages, 3 figure

Low-Energy Effective Action in Non-Perturbative Electrodynamics in Curved Spacetime

We study the heat kernel for the Laplace type partial differential operator acting on smooth sections of a complex spin-tensor bundle over a generic $n$-dimensional Riemannian manifold. Assuming that the curvature of the U(1) connection (that we call the electromagnetic field) is constant we compute the first two coefficients of the non-perturbative asymptotic expansion of the heat kernel which are of zero and the first order in Riemannian curvature and of arbitrary order in the electromagnetic field. We apply these results to the study of the effective action in non-perturbative electrodynamics in four dimensions and derive a generalization of the Schwinger's result for the creation of scalar and spinor particles in electromagnetic field induced by the gravitational field. We discover a new infrared divergence in the imaginary part of the effective action due to the gravitational corrections, which seems to be a new physical effect.Comment: LaTeX, 42 page

New data on the distribution of Cossidae (Lepidoptera) in Mongolia

We recorded a new species of Cossidae – Acossus terebrus (Denis & Schiffermüller, 1776) – for Mongolia (Tov Aimak). We also report on the most northern habitat of the cossid genus Gobibatyr Yakovlev, 2004 (North-West Mongolia, Bayan-Ulegej Aimak), which shows the permeability of the Mongolian Altai Mountain Range for some elements of the Dzungarian fauna. Additionally, our sampling resulted in adding new localities to the ranges of Catopta perunovi Yakovlev, 2007 and Cecryphallus nubila (Staudinger, 1895) (first discovered in Hovd Aimak)

Silicon nanoparticles and interstellar extinction

To examine a recently proposed hypothesis that silicon nanoparticles are the source of extended red emission (ERE) in the interstellar medium, we performed a detailed modeling of the mean Galactic extinction in the presence of silicon nanoparticles. For this goal we used the appropriate optical constants of nanosized Si, essentially different from those of bulk Si due to quantum confinement. It was found that a dust mixture of silicon nanoparticles, bare graphite grains, silicate core-organic refractory mantle grains and three-layer silicate-water ice-organic refractory grains works well in explaining the extinction and, in addition, results in the acceptable fractions of UV/visible photons absorbed by silicon nanoparticles: 0.071-0.081. Since these fractions barely agree with the fraction of UV/visible photons needed to excite the observed ERE, we conclude that the intrinsic photon conversion efficiency of the photoluminescence by silicon nanoparticles must be near 100%, if they are the source of the ERE.Comment: Latex2e, uses emulateapj.sty (included), multicol.sty, epsf.sty, 6 pages, 3 figures (8 Postscript files), accepted for publication in ApJ Letters, complete Postscript file is also available at http://physics.technion.ac.il/~zubko/eb.html#SNP

Proper Dirac Quantization of Free Particle on D-Dimensional Sphere

We show that an unambiguous and correct quantization of the second-class constrained system of a free particle on a sphere in $D$ dimensions is possible only by converting the constraints to abelian gauge constraints, which are of first class in Dirac's classification scheme. The energy spectrum is equal to that of a pure Laplace-Beltrami operator with no additional constant arising from the curvature of the sphere. A quantization of Dirac's modified Poisson brackets for second-class constraints is also possible and unique, but must be rejected since the resulting energy spectrum is physically incorrect.Comment: Author Information under http://www.physik.fu-berlin.de/~kleinert/institution.html Paper also at http://www.physik.fu-berlin.de/~kleinert/kleiner_re253/preprint.htm