9,674 research outputs found
Gold and Greater Britain: Jevons, Trollope, and Settler Colonialism
The Australian gold rushes of the 1850s provide an exemplary test case for exploring the impact of Greater Britain—the settler colonial empire—on the Victorian novel and political economy. British gold diggers’ nomadism operated in seeming antithesis to the colonies’ explosive growth, which posed a conceptual challenge both to political economy’s stadial model of societal development and to liberal narratives of labor and land—narratives that underpinned concepts of individual character and civil society. Informed by colonial writing and the experience of gold fields, W. S. Jevons’s Theory of Political Economy (1871) and Anthony Trollope’s John Caldigate (1879) reimagine metropolitan space and subjectivity in settler-colonial terms, helping lay the ground for a deterritorialized, global British identity
Strings after D-term inflation: evolution and properties of chiral cosmic strings
We motivate the study of chiral cosmic strings through a scenario of
structure formation which mixes D-term inflation and strings. We then discuss
some properties of chiral cosmic strings, and results regarding their evolution
and possible cosmological consequences are presented.Comment: 4 pages, 2 figures. To appear in the proceedings of the CAPP2000
conference held at Verbier, Switzerland between july 17th and 28th, 200
Testing and comparing tachyon inflation to single standard field inflation
We compare the standard single scalar field inflationary predictions with
those of an inflationary phase driven by a tachyon field. A slow-roll formalism
is defined for tachyon inflation and we derive the spectra of scalar and tensor
perturbations as well as the consistency relations. At lowest order the
predictions of standard and tachyon inflation are the same. Higher order
deviations are present and their observational relevance is discussed. We
discuss the observational consequences of some typical inflationary tachyon
potentials and compare them with recent data. All the models predict a negative
and very small running of the scalar spectral index, and they consistently lie
within the 1 contour of the data set. However, the regime of blue
scalar spectral index and large gravity waves is not explored by these models.Comment: Proceedings of the 10th Marcel Grossmann Meeting, Rio de Janeiro,
July 2003, 6 pages, 1 figur
Orbifold Riemann Surfaces and the Yang-Mills-Higgs Equations
We extend Hitchin's results on "The self-duality equations on a Riemann
surface" (Proc. LMS (3), vol. 55, 1987) to orbifold Riemann surfaces. We prove
existence results for orbifold solutions of the Yang-Mills-Higgs equations and
construct the moduli space of solutions. These moduli spaces provide
interesting examples of non-compact hyper-Kahler manifolds in all dimensions
divisible by 4 and of completely integrable Hamiltonian systems. We also
reinterpret these moduli spaces as spaces of orbifold Higgs bundles and as
representation varieties of Fuchsian groups.Comment: Hard copies are available on request. This paper will appear in the
"Annali della Scuola Normale Superiore di Pisa (classe di scienze)".
LaTeX2.09 with AMS font
Translation invariant time-dependent solutions to massive gravity
Homogeneous time-dependent solutions of massive gravity generalise the plane
wave solutions of the linearised Fierz-Pauli equations for a massive spin-two
particle, as well as the Kasner solutions of General Relativity. We show that
they also allow a clear counting of the degrees of freedom and represent a
simplified framework to work out the constraints, the equations of motion and
the initial value formulation. We work in the vielbein formulation of massive
gravity, find the phase space resulting from the constraints and show that
several disconnected sectors of solutions exist some of which are unstable. The
initial values determine the sector to which a solution belongs. Classically,
the theory is not pathological but quantum mechanically the theory may suffer
from instabilities. The latter are not due to an extra ghost-like degree of
freedom.Comment: 31 page
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