Bound on the Photon Charge from the Phase Coherence of Extragalactic Radiation

If the photon possessed a nonzero charge, then electromagnetic waves traveling along different paths would acquire Aharonov-Bohm phase differences. The fact that such an effect has not hindered interferometric astronomy places a bound on the photon charge estimated to be at the 10^(-32) e level if all photons have the same charge and 10^(-46) e if different photons can carry different charges.Comment: 8 pages, new bound added, version appearing in Phys. Rev. Let

Nonlinear Evolution of Anisotropic Cosmological Power

There has been growing interest in the possibility of testing more precisely the assumption of statistical isotropy of primordial density perturbations. If it is to be tested with galaxy surveys at distance scales <~ 10 Mpc, then nonlinear evolution of anisotropic power must be understood. To this end, we calculate the angular dependence of the power spectrum to third order in perturbation theory for a primordial power spectrum with a quadrupole dependence on the wavevector direction. Our results suggest that primordial power anisotropies will be suppressed by <~ 7% in the quasilinear regime. We also show that the skewness in the statistically anisotropic theory differs by no more than 1% from that in the isotropic theory.Comment: 4 pages, 1 figure; accepted for publication in Physical Review Letter

Domain Walls in Strongly Coupled Theories

Domain walls in strongly coupled gauge theories are discussed. A general mechanism is suggested automatically leading to massless gauge bosons localized on the wall. In one of the models considered, outside the wall the theory is in the non-Abelian confining phase, while inside the wall it is in the Abelian Coulomb phase. Confining property of the non-Abelian theories is a key ingredient of the mechanism which may be of practical use in the context of the dynamic compactification scenarios. In supersymmetric (N=1) Yang-Mills theories the energy density of the wall can be exactly calculated in the strong coupling regime. This calculation presents a further example of non-trivial physical quantities that can be found exactly by exploiting specific properties of supersymmetry. A key observation is the fact that the wall in this theory is a BPS-saturated state.Comment: Several typos correcte

Radiatively Induced Lorentz and Gauge Symmetry Violation in Electrodynamics with Varying alpha

A time-varying fine structure constant alpha(t) could give rise to Lorentz- and CPT-violating changes to the vacuum polarization, which would affect photon propagation. Such changes to the effective action can violate gauge invariance, but they are otherwise permitted. However, in the minimal theory of varying alpha, no such terms are generated at lowest order. At second order, vacuum polarization can generate an instability--a Lorentz-violating analogue of a negative photon mass squared -m^2 proportional to alpha [(d alpha/dt) / alpha]^2 log (Lambda^2), where Lambda is the cutoff for the low-energy effective theory.Comment: 14 page

Operator Product Expansion, Heavy Quarks, QCD Duality and its Violations

The quark (gluon)-hadron duality constitutes a basis for the theoretical treatment of a wide range of inclusive processes -- from hadronic \tau decays and R_{e^+e^-}, to semileptonic and nonleptonic decay rates of heavy flavor hadrons. A theoretical analysis of these processes is carried out by using the operator product expansion in the Euclidean domain, with subsequent analytic continuation to the Minkowski domain. We formulate the notion of the quark (gluon)-hadron duality in quantitative terms, then classify various contributions leading to violations of duality. A prominent role in the violations of duality seems to belong to the so called exponential terms which, conceptually, may represent the (truncated) tail of the power series. A qualitative model, relying on an instanton background field, is developed, allowing one to get an estimate of the exponential terms. We then discuss a number of applications, mostly from heavy quark physics.Comment: 59 pages, 6 figures, epsf.sty required. Revised: Styllistic changes; minor clarifications added; three references corrected; minor changes in the color-related factor

Cosmic Microwave Background Statistics for a Direction-Dependent Primordial Power Spectrum

Statistical isotropy of primordial perturbations is a common assumption in cosmology, but it is an assumption that should be tested. To this end, we develop cosmic microwave background statistics for a primordial power spectrum that depends on the direction, as well as the magnitude, of the Fourier wavevector. We first consider a simple estimator that searches in a model-independent way for anisotropy in the square of the temperature (and/or polarization) fluctuation. We then construct the minimum-variance estimators for the coefficients of a spherical-harmonic expansion of the direction-dependence of the primordial power spectrum. To illustrate, we apply these statistics to an inflation model with a quadrupole dependence of the primordial power spectrum on direction and find that a power quadrupole as small as 2.0% can be detected with the Planck satellite.Comment: Published in Phys. Rev. D; 8 pages; 1 table; Table 1 corrected; references adde

Top quark longitudinal polarization near the threshold in l+ l- annihilation

We show that the longitudinal polarization of the top quarks produced in the annihilation of e+ e- or mu+ mu- into tbar t at energies near the threshold is not affected by the large Coulomb-type corrections, which greatly modify the total cross section. Thus the longitudinal polarization, although small, may provide an independent information on the mass and the width of the top quark, largely independent of the uncertainty in alpha_s.Comment: 6 pages, LaTeX, no figures, added references, corrected typo

BPS Saturated Vacua Interpolation along One Compact Dimension

A class of generalized Wess-Zumino models with distinct vacua is investigated. These models allow for BPS saturated vacua interpolation along one compact spatial dimension. The properties of these interpolations are studied.Comment: 8 pages, 4 figure

Domain walls in supersymmetric QCD: from weak to strong coupling

We consider domain walls that appear in supersymmetric QCD with Nf < Nc massive flavours. In particular, for 2 Nf < Nc we explicitly construct the domain walls that interpolate between vacua labeled by i and (i+ N_f). We show that these solutions are Bogomol'nyi-Prasad-Sommerfield (BPS) saturated for any value of the mass of the matter fields. This fact allows us to evaluate the large mass limit of these domain walls. We comment on the relevance of these solutions for supersymmetric gluodynamics.Comment: 4 pages, 4 figures, LaTex, uses psfig.st

Modified mode-expansion on a BPS wall related to the nonlinear realization

We propose a modified mode-expansion of the bulk fields in a BPS domain wall background to obtain the effective theory on the wall. The broken SUSY is nonlinearly realized on each mode defined by our mode-expansion. Our work clarifies a relation between two different approaches to derive the effective theory on a BPS wall, {\it i.e.} the nonlinear realization approach and the mode-expansion approach. We also discuss a further modification that respects the Lorentz and $U(1)_R$ symmetries broken by the wall.Comment: LaTeX file, 21 pages, no figure