Hawking's chronology protection conjecture: singularity structure of the quantum stress--energy tensor

The recent renaissance of wormhole physics has led to a very disturbing observation: If traversable wormholes exist then it appears to be rather easy to to transform such wormholes into time machines. This extremely disturbing state of affairs has lead Hawking to promulgate his chronology protection conjecture. This paper continues a program begun in an earlier paper [Physical Review {\bf D47}, 554--565 (1993), hepth@xxx/9202090]. An explicit calculation of the vacuum expectation value of the renormalized stress--energy tensor in wormhole spacetimes is presented. Point--splitting techniques are utilized. Particular attention is paid to computation of the Green function [in its Hadamard form], and the structural form of the stress-energy tensor near short closed spacelike geodesics. Detailed comparisons with previous calculations are presented, leading to a pleasingly unified overview of the situation.Comment: plain LaTeX, 13 page

The ZX-calculus is incomplete for quantum mechanics

We prove that the ZX-calculus is incomplete for quantum mechanics. We suggest the addition of a new 'color-swap' rule, of which currently no analytical formulation is known and which we suspect may be necessary, but not sufficient to make the ZX-calculus complete.Comment: In Proceedings QPL 2014, arXiv:1412.810

Quick-disconnect coupling safe transfer of hazardous fluids

Quick-disconnect coupling is used for uncoupling of plumbing during ground-to-vehicle transfer of cryogenic and hazardous fluids. The coupling allows remote positive control of liquid pressure and flow during the transfer operation, remote connection and separation capabilities, and negligible liquid spillage upon disconnection

Fermions on Non-Trivial Topologies

An exact expression for the Green function of a purely fermionic system moving on the manifold $\Re \times \Sigma^{D-1}$, where $\Sigma^{D-1}$ is a $(D-1)$-torus, is found. This expression involves the bosonic analog of $\chi_n = e^{in\theta}$ corresponding to the irreducible representation for the n-th class of homotopy and in the fermionic case for D=2 and 3, $\chi_n$ is a measure of the statistics of the particles. For higher dimensions ($D \geq 4$), there is no analogue interpretation however this could, presumably, indicate a generation of mass as in quantum field theories at finite temperature.Comment: Some portions re-written, references added. To appear in PL

The Path Integral for a Particle in Curved Spaces and Weyl Anomalies

The computation of anomalies in quantum field theory may be carried out by evaluating path integral Jacobians, as first shown by Fujikawa. The evaluation of these Jacobians can be cast in the form of a quantum mechanical problem, whose solution has a path integral representation. For the case of Weyl anomalies, also called trace anomalies, one is immediately led to study the path integral for a particle moving in curved spaces. We analyze the latter in a manifestly covariant way and by making use of ghost fields. The introduction of the ghost fields allows us to represent the path integral measure in a form suitable for performing the perturbative expansion. We employ our method to compute the Hamiltonian associated with the evolution kernel given by the path integral with fixed boundary conditions, and use this result to evaluate the trace needed in field theoretic computation of Weyl anomalies in two dimensions.Comment: 15 page