Strings in a 2-d Extremal Black Hole

String theory on 2-d charged black holes corresponding to (SL(2)xU(1)_L)/U(1) exact asymmetric quotient CFTs are investigated. These backgrounds can be embedded, in particular, in a two dimensional heterotic string. In the extremal case, the quotient CFT description captures the near horizon physics, and is equivalent to strings in AdS_2 with a gauge field. Such string vacua possess an infinite space-time Virasoro symmetry, and hence enhancement of global space-time Lie symmetries to affine symmetries, in agreement with the conjectured AdS_2/CFT_1 correspondence. We argue that the entropy of these 2-d black holes in string theory is compatible with semi-classical results, and show that in perturbative computations part of an incoming flux is absorbed by the black hole. Moreover, on the way we find evidence that the 2-d heterotic string is closely related to the N=(2,1) string, and conjecture that they are dual.Comment: 1+22 pages, harvmac, 1 eps figure; v2: refs. added, typo correcte

Simultaneous communication in noisy channels

A sender wishes to broadcast a message of length $n$ over an alphabet to $r$ users, where each user $i$, $1 \leq i \leq r$ should be able to receive one of $m_i$ possible messages. The broadcast channel has noise for each of the users (possibly different noise for different users), who cannot distinguish between some pairs of letters. The vector $(m_1, m_2,...s, m_r)_{(n)}$ is said to be feasible if length $n$ encoding and decoding schemes exist enabling every user to decode his message. A rate vector $(R_1, R_2,..., R_r)$ is feasible if there exists a sequence of feasible vectors $(m_1, m_2,..., m_r)_{(n)}$ such that $R_i = \lim_{n \mapsto \infty} \frac {\log_2 m_i} {n}, {for all} i$. We determine the feasible rate vectors for several different scenarios and investigate some of their properties. An interesting case discussed is when one user can only distinguish between all the letters in a subset of the alphabet. Tight restrictions on the feasible rate vectors for some specific noise types for the other users are provided. The simplest non-trivial cases of two users and alphabet of size three are fully characterized. To this end a more general previously known result, to which we sketch an alternative proof, is used. This problem generalizes the study of the Shannon capacity of a graph, by considering more than a single user