Charge and the topology of spacetime

A new class of electrically charged wormholes is described in which the outer 2-sphere is not spanned by a compact, co-orientable hypersurface, These wormholes can therefore display net electric charge from the source-free Maxwell equations. This extends the work of Sorkin on non-space-orientable manifolds, to spacetimes which do not admit a time orientation. The work is motivated by the suggestion that quantum theory can be explained by modelling elementary particles as regions of spacetime with non-trivial causal structure. The simplest example of an electrically charged spacetime carries a spherical symmetry

Symplectomorphism group relations and degenerations of Landau-Ginzburg models

In this paper, we describe explicit relations in the symplectomorphism groups of toric hypersurfaces. To define the elements involved, we construct a proper stack of toric hypersurfaces with compactifying boundary representing toric hypersurface degenerations. Our relations arise through the study of the one dimensional strata of this stack. The results are then examined from the perspective of homological mirror symmetry where we view sequences of relations as maximal degenerations of Landau-Ginzburg models. We then study the B-model mirror to these degenerations, which gives a new mirror symmetry approach to the minimal model program.Comment: 100 pages, 24 figure