Self-Dual Spin-3 And 4 Theories

We present self-dual spin-3 and 4 actions using relevant dreibein fields. since these actions start with a Chern-Simons like kinetic term (and therefore cannot be obtained through dimensional reduction) one might wonder whether they need the presence of auxiliary ghost-killings fields. It turns out that they must contain, also in this three dimensional case, auxiliary fields. They do not break self-duality: their free actions do not contain kinetic second order terms.Comment: 10, IC/91-20

Bosonic Massless Higher Spin Fields from Matrix Model

We study matrix models as a new approach to formulate massless higher spin gauge field theory. As a first step in this direction, we show that the free equation of motion of bosonic massless higher spin gauge fields can be derived from that of a matrix model.Comment: 19pages, no figures, one reference adde

Second Law Violations in Lovelock Gravity for Black Hole Mergers

We study the classical second law of black hole thermodynamics, for Lovelock theories (other than General Relativity), in arbitrary dimensions. Using the standard formula for black hole entropy, we construct scenarios involving the merger of two black holes in which the entropy instantaneously decreases. Our construction involves a Kaluza-Klein compactification down to a dimension in which one of the Lovelock terms is topological. We discuss some open issues in the definition of the second law which might be used to compensate this entropy decrease.Comment: 15 pages, 1 figure, v2 Title change & minor revisions to match published version, v3 fixed accidental deletion of author name

Non-abelian self-duality from self-interaction

The non-abelian self-dual action in three dimensions is derived using the self-interaction mechanism.Comment: Latex, 7 page

Improvement of measurement accuracy in SU(1,1) interferometers

We consider an SU(1,1) interferometer employing four-wave mixers that is fed with two-mode states which are both coherent and intelligent states of the SU(1,1) Lie group. It is shown that the phase sensitivity of the interferometer can be essentially improved by using input states with a large photon-number difference between the modes.Comment: LaTeX, 5 pages, 1 figure (compressed PostScript, available at http://www.technion.ac.il/~brif/graphics/interfer_graph/qopt.ps.gz ). More information on http://www.technion.ac.il/~brif/science.htm

The mass of the graviton and the cosmological constant

We show that the graviton acquires a mass in a de Sitter background given by $m_{g}^{2}=-{2/3}\Lambda.$ This is precisely the fine-tuning value required for the perturbed gravitational field to mantain its two degrees of freedom.Comment: Title changed and few details added, without any changes in the conclusio

A note on spin two fields in curved backgrounds

We reconsider the consistency constraints on a free massless symmetric, rank 2, tensor field in a background and confirm that they uniquely require it to be the linear deviation about (cosmological) Einstein gravity. Neither adding non-minimal higher derivative terms nor changing the gauge transformations by allowing terms non-analytic in the cosmological constant alters this fact.Comment: 5 pages - Minor misprints corrected - Version accepted by Class. Quant. Gra