Comments on Challenges for Quantum Gravity

We examine radiative corrections arising from Lorentz violating dimension five operators presumably associated with Planck scale physics as recently considered by Myers and Pospelov. We find that observational data result in bounds on the dimensionless parameters of the order $10^{-15}$. These represent the most stringent bounds on Lorentz violation to date

Toric embedded resolutions of quasi-ordinary hypersurface singularities

We build two embedded resolution procedures of a quasi-ordinary singularity of complex analytic hypersurface, by using toric morphisms which depend only on the characteristic monomials associated to a quasi-ordinary projection of the singularity. This result answers an open problem of Lipman in Equisingularity and simultaneous resolution of singularities, Resolution of Singularities, Progress in Mathematics No. 181, 2000, 485-503. In the first procedure the singularity is embedded as hypersurface. In the second procedure, which is inspired by a work of Goldin and Teissier for plane curves (see Resolving singularities of plane analytic branches with one toric morphism,loc. cit., pages 315-340), we re-embed the singularity in an affine space of bigger dimension in such a way that one toric morphism provides its embedded resolution. We compare both procedures and we show that they coincide under suitable hypothesis.Comment: To apear in Annales de l'Institut Fourier (Grenoble

Bijectiveness of the Nash Map for Quasi-Ordinary Hypersurface Singularities

In this paper we give a positive answer to a question of Nash concerning the arc space of a singularity, for the class of quasi-ordinary hypersurface singularities, extending to this case previous results and techniques of Shihoko Ishii.Comment: comments and references adde

Dark energy from quantum gravity discreteness

We argue that discreteness at the Planck scale (naturally expected to arise from quantum gravity) might manifest in the form of minute violations of energy-momentum conservation of the matter degrees of freedom when described in terms of (idealized) smooth fields on a smooth spacetime. In the context of applications to cosmology such `energy diffusion' from the low energy matter degrees of freedom to the discrete structures underlying spacetime leads to the emergence of an effective dark energy term in Einstein's equations. We estimate this effect using a (relational) hypothesis about the materialization of discreteness in quantum gravity which is motivated by the strict observational constraints supporting the validity of Lorentz invariance at low energies. The predictions coming from simple dimensional analysis yield a cosmological constant of the order of magnitude of the observed value without fine tuning.Comment: Typos corrected, closer to published versio

Loud and Trendy: Crowdsourcing Impressions of Social Ambiance in Popular Indoor Urban Places

New research cutting across architecture, urban studies, and psychology is contextualizing the understanding of urban spaces according to the perceptions of their inhabitants. One fundamental construct that relates place and experience is ambiance, which is defined as "the mood or feeling associated with a particular place". We posit that the systematic study of ambiance dimensions in cities is a new domain for which multimedia research can make pivotal contributions. We present a study to examine how images collected from social media can be used for the crowdsourced characterization of indoor ambiance impressions in popular urban places. We design a crowdsourcing framework to understand suitability of social images as data source to convey place ambiance, to examine what type of images are most suitable to describe ambiance, and to assess how people perceive places socially from the perspective of ambiance along 13 dimensions. Our study is based on 50,000 Foursquare images collected from 300 popular places across six cities worldwide. The results show that reliable estimates of ambiance can be obtained for several of the dimensions. Furthermore, we found that most aggregate impressions of ambiance are similar across popular places in all studied cities. We conclude by presenting a multidisciplinary research agenda for future research in this domain

Catastrophic Evaporation of Rocky Planets

Short-period exoplanets can have dayside surface temperatures surpassing 2000 K, hot enough to vaporize rock and drive a thermal wind. Small enough planets evaporate completely. We construct a radiative-hydrodynamic model of atmospheric escape from strongly irradiated, low-mass rocky planets, accounting for dust-gas energy exchange in the wind. Rocky planets with masses < 0.1 M_Earth (less than twice the mass of Mercury) and surface temperatures > 2000 K are found to disintegrate entirely in < 10 Gyr. When our model is applied to Kepler planet candidate KIC 12557548b --- which is believed to be a rocky body evaporating at a rate of dM/dt > 0.1 M_Earth/Gyr --- our model yields a present-day planet mass of < 0.02 M_Earth or less than about twice the mass of the Moon. Mass loss rates depend so strongly on planet mass that bodies can reside on close-in orbits for Gyrs with initial masses comparable to or less than that of Mercury, before entering a final short-lived phase of catastrophic mass loss (which KIC 12557548b has entered). Because this catastrophic stage lasts only up to a few percent of the planet's life, we estimate that for every object like KIC 12557548b, there should be 10--100 close-in quiescent progenitors with sub-day periods whose hard-surface transits may be detectable by Kepler --- if the progenitors are as large as their maximal, Mercury-like sizes (alternatively, the progenitors could be smaller and more numerous). According to our calculations, KIC 12557548b may have lost ~70% of its formation mass; today we may be observing its naked iron core.Comment: Accepted to MNRAS with minor edits compared to version

Toric Geometry and the Semple-Nash modification

This paper proposes some material towards a theory of general toric varieties without the assumption of normality. Their combinatorial description involves a fan to which is attached a set of semigroups subjected to gluing-up conditions. In particular it contains a combinatorial construction of the blowing up of a sheaf of monomial ideals on a toric variety. In the second part it is shown that over an algebraically closed base field of zero characteristic the Semple-Nash modification of a general toric variety is isomorphic to the blowing up of the sheaf of logarithmic jacobian ideals and that in any characteristic this blowing-up is an isomorphism if and only if the toric variety is non singular. In the second part we prove that orders on the lattice of monomials (toric valuations) of maximal rank are uniformized by iterated Sempla-Nash modifications.Comment: New version. Appeared in "Revista de la Real Academia de Ciencias Exactas, Fisicas y Naturales, Serie A Matematicas", October 2012 (Electronic