A Meandering Inflaton

If the cosmological inflationary scenario took place in the cosmic landscape in string theory, the inflaton, the scalar mode responsible for inflation, would have meandered in a complicated multi-dimensional potential. We show that this meandering property naturally leads to many e-folds of inflation, a necessary condition for a successful inflationary scenario. This behavior also leads to fluctuations in the primordial power spectrum of the cosmic microwave background radiation, which may be detected in a near future cosmic variance limited experiment like PLANCK.Comment: minor additions, matched to published versio

Energy levels of a parabolically confined quantum dot in the presence of spin-orbit interaction

We present a theoretical study of the energy levels in a parabolically confined quantum dot in the presence of the Rashba spin-orbit interaction (SOI). The features of some low-lying states in various strengths of the SOI are examined at finite magnetic fields. The presence of a magnetic field enhances the possibility of the spin polarization and the SOI leads to different energy dependence on magnetic fields applied. Furthermore, in high magnetic fields, the spectra of low-lying states show basic features of Fock-Darwin levels as well as Landau levels.Comment: 6 pages, 4 figures, accepted by J. Appl. Phy

Spectrum of low-lying s3QQˉs^{3}Q\bar{Q} configurations with negative parity

Spectrum of low-lying five-quark configurations with strangeness quantum number $S=-3$ and negative parity is studied in three kinds of constituent quark models, namely the one gluon exchange, Goldstone Boson exchange, and instanton-induced hyperfine interaction models, respectively. Our numerical results show that the lowest energy states in all the three employed models are lying at $\sim$1800 MeV, about 200 MeV lower than predictions of various quenched three-quark models. In addition, it is very interesting that the state with the lowest energy in one gluon exchange model is with spin 3/2, but 1/2 in the other two models.Comment: Version published in Phys. Rev.