Physics and Astrophysics of Strange Quark Matter

3-flavor quark matter (strange quark matter; SQM) can be stable or metastable for a wide range of strong interaction parameters. If so, SQM can play an important role in cosmology, neutron stars, cosmic ray physics, and relativistic heavy-ion collisions. As an example of the intimate connections between astrophysics and heavy-ion collision physics, this Chapter gives an overview of the physical properties of SQM in bulk and of small-baryon number strangelets; discusses the possible formation, destruction, and implications of lumps of SQM (quark nuggets) in the early Universe; and describes the structure and signature of strange stars, as well as formation and detection of strangelets in cosmic rays. It is concluded, that astrophysical and laboratory searches are complementary in many respects, and that both should be pursued to test the intriguing possibility of a strange ground state for hadronic matter, and (more generally) to improve our knowledge of the strong interactions.Comment: 45 pages incl. figures. To appear in "Hadrons in Dense Matter and Hadrosynthesis", Lecture Notes in Physics, Springer Verlag (ed. J.Cleymans

Thermal spikes from stopped muons and density effects in muon-catalyzed fusion

Local hot regions caused by energy deposition from stopped muons can significantly influence the cycle rate of muon catalyzed fusion. The observed nonlinear density dependence of molecular formation rates is explained as a result of the temperature dependence since muonic deuterium-tritium molecules are formed at a high effective temperature that increases roughly linearly with density

Simple recurrent neural networks for support vector machine training

We show how to implement a simple procedure for support vector machine training as a recurrent neural network. Invoking the fact that support vector machines can be trained using Frank-Wolfe optimization which in turn can be seen as a form of reservoir computing, we obtain a model that is of simpler structure and can be implemented more easily than those proposed in previous contributions