New vacuum solutions of conformal Weyl gravity

The Bach equation, i.e., the vacuum field equation following from the Lagrangian L=C_{ijkl}C^{ijkl}, will be completely solved for the case that the metric is conformally related to the cartesian product of two 2-spaces; this covers the spherically and the plane symmetric space-times as special subcases. Contrary to other approaches, we make a covariant 2+2-decomposition of the field equation, and so we are able to apply results from 2-dimensional gravity. Finally, some cosmological solutions will be presented and discussed.Comment: 15 pages, LaTeX, no figures, submitted to J. Math. Phy

Geometry-induced localization of thermal fluctuations in ultrathin superconducting structures

Thermal fluctuations of the order parameter in an ultrathin triangular shaped superconducting structure are studied near $T_{c}$, in zero applied field. We find that the order parameter is prone to much larger fluctuations in the corners of the structure as compared to its interior. This geometry-induced localization of thermal fluctuations is attributed to the fact that condensate confinement in the corners is characterised by a lower effective dimensionality, which favors stronger fluctuations.Comment: 9 pages, 5 figure

Coupled fermion and boson production in a strong background mean-field

We derive quantum kinetic equations for fermion and boson production starting from a phi^4 Lagrangian with minimal coupling to fermions. Decomposing the scalar field into a mean-field part and fluctuations we obtain spontaneous pair creation driven by a self-interacting strong background field. The produced fermion and boson pairs are self-consistently coupled. Consequently back reactions arise from fermion and boson currents determining the time dependent self-interacting background mean-field. We explore the numerical solution in flux tube geometry for the time evolution of the mean-field as well as for the number- and energy densities for fermions and bosons. We find that after a characteristic time all energy is converted from the background mean-field to particle creation. Applying this general approach to the production of ``quarks'' and ``gluons'' a typical time scale for the collapse of the flux tube is 1.5 fm/c.Comment: 9 pages, latex, epsfig, 7 figure