Asymmetric Cosets

The aim of this work is to present a general theory of coset models G/H in which different left and right actions of H on G are gauged. Our main results include a formula for their modular invariant partition function, the construction of a large set of boundary states and a general description of the corresponding brane geometries. The paper concludes with some explicit applications to the base of the conifold and to the time-dependent Nappi-Witten background.Comment: 34 pages, LaTeX, 8 figures, 1 table, v2: references added, v3: typos correcte

The Stueckelberg Field

In 1938, Stueckelberg introduced a scalar field which makes an Abelian gauge theory massive but preserves gauge invariance. The Stueckelberg mechanism is the introduction of new fields to reveal a symmetry of a gauge--fixed theory. We first review the Stueckelberg mechanism in the massive Abelian gauge theory. We then extend this idea to the standard model, stueckelberging the hypercharge U(1) and thus giving a mass to the physical photon. This introduces an infrared regulator for the photon in the standard electroweak theory, along with a modification of the weak mixing angle accompanied by a plethora of new effects. Notably, neutrinos couple to the photon and charged leptons have also a pseudo-vector coupling. Finally, we review the historical influence of Stueckelberg's 1938 idea, which led to applications in many areas not anticipated by the author, such as strings. We describe the numerous proposals to generalize the Stueckelberg trick to the non-Abelian case with the aim to find alternatives to the standard model. Nevertheless, the Higgs mechanism in spontaneous symmetry breaking remains the only presently known way to give masses to non-Abelian vector fields in a renormalizable and unitary theory.Comment: 58 pages, revtex4 RMP format. Added references, minor improvements to tex

Escape Rates and Singular Limiting Distributions for Intermittent Maps with Holes

We study the escape dynamics in the presence of a hole of a standard family of intermittent maps of the unit interval with neutral fixed point at the origin (and finite absolutely continuous invariant measure). Provided that the hole (is a cylinder that) does not contain any neighborhood of the origin, the surviving volume is shown to decay at polynomial speed with time. The associated polynomial escape rate depends on the density of the initial distribution, more precisely, on its behavior in the vicinity of the origin. Moreover, the associated normalized push forward measures are proved to converge to the point mass supported at the origin, in sharp contrast to systems with exponential escape rate. Finally, a similar result is obtained for more general systems with subexponential escape rates; namely that the Ces\`aro limit of normalized push forward measures is typically singular, invariant and supported on the asymptotic survivor set.Comment: To appear in Trans. Amer. Math. So

Toric Geometry and String Theory Descriptions of Qudit Systems

In this paper, we propose a new way to approach qudit systems using toric geometry and related topics including the local mirror symmetry used in the string theory compactification. We refer to such systems as (n,d) quantum systems where $n$ and $d$ denote the number of the qudits and the basis states respectively. Concretely, we first relate the (n,d) quantum systems to the holomorphic sections of line bundles on n dimensional projective spaces CP^{n} with degree n(d-1). These sections are in one-to-one correspondence with d^n integral points on a n-dimensional simplex. Then, we explore the local mirror map in the toric geometry language to establish a linkage between the (n,d) quantum systems and type II D-branes placed at singularities of local Calabi-Yau manifolds. (1,d) and (2,d) are analyzed in some details and are found to be related to the mirror of the ALE space with the A_{d-1} singularity and a generalized conifold respectively.Comment: 12 pages,latex, 2 figures. Accepted for publication in Journal of Geometry and Physics, JPS(2015