Strong-Electroweak Unification at About 4 TeV

It is shown how an $SU(3)^{N}$ nonsupersymmetric quiver gauge theory can accommodate the standard model with three chiral families and unify all of $SU(3)_C$, $SU(2)_L$ and $U(1)_Y$ couplings with high accuracy at one unique scale estimated as $M \simeq 4$ TeV.Comment: 3 pages LaTeX. Typos corrected. Text and references adde

Charmonium sum rules applied to a holographic model

The heavy-quark QCD sum rules are applied to a model of charmonium based upon the gauge/gravity duality. We find that there is strong agreement between the moments of the polarization function calculated from the holographic model and the experimental data suggesting that the model is consistent with the heavy-quark QCD sum rules at zero temperature.Comment: 9 pages, 2 figures, Corrected typos to bring inline with PRD versio

Shining a Gluon Beam Through Quark-Gluon Plasma

We compute the energy density radiated by a quark undergoing circular motion in strongly coupled $\mathcal N = 4$ supersymmetric Yang-Mills plasma. If it were in vacuum, this quark would radiate a beam of strongly coupled radiation whose angular distribution has been characterized and is very similar to that of synchrotron radiation produced by an electron in circular motion in electrodynamics. Here, we watch this beam of gluons getting quenched by the strongly coupled plasma. We find that a beam of gluons of momenta $\sim q \gg \pi T$ is attenuated rapidly, over a distance $\sim q^{1/3} (\pi T)^{-4/3}$ in a plasma with temperature $T$. As the beam propagates through the plasma at the speed of light, it sheds trailing sound waves with momenta $\lesssim \pi T$. Presumably these sound waves would thermalize in the plasma if they were not hit soon after their production by the next pulse of gluons from the lighthouse-like rotating quark. At larger and larger $q$, the trailing sound wave becomes less and less prominent. The outward going beam of gluon radiation itself shows no tendency to spread in angle or to shift toward larger wavelengths, even as it is completely attenuated. In this regard, the behavior of the beam of gluons that we analyze is reminiscent of the behavior of jets produced in heavy ion collisions at the LHC that lose a significant fraction of their energy without appreciable change in their angular distribution or their momentum distribution as they plow through the strongly coupled quark-gluon plasma produced in these collisions.Comment: 16 pages, 4 figure

A new type of lordosis and vertebral body compression in Gilthead seabream, Sparus aurata Linnaeus, 1758: aetiology, anatomy and consequences for survival

A new type of vertebral malformation is described, consisting of deformed cartilaginous neural and haemal processes and the compression and fusion of vertebral bodies. The malformation is designated as haemal vertebral compression and fusion (haemal VCF). We studied the aetiology of the malformations and described microanatomical histopathological alterations. The malformations were detected during routine quality control in one of six monitored Gilthead sea bream populations. Haemal VCF affected the posterior part of the vertebral column (haemal vertebrae). In 20% of the deformed specimens, haemal VCF was combined with lordosis. At 35dph (days post-hatching), early anatomical signs of the haemal VCF consisted of abnormal centrum mineralization, malformed cartilaginous neural and haemal processes and developing lordotic alterations. The histological examination of the deformed individuals revealed that haemal VCF is preceded by notochord abnormalities. The frequency of deformed individuals was three times higher at 35 than at 61dph (50.3% vs. 17.2%, n=157 and n=250, respectively). No signs of repair or reversion of malformations have been observed. Thus, the steep decrease in deformities in older animals suggests that haemal VCF is linked to high mortality rates. The results are discussed in respect of the possible causative factors of haemal VCF

Type IIB orientifolds with discrete torsion

We consider compact four-dimensional ${\bf Z_N}\times {\bf Z_M}$ type IIB orientifolds, for certain values of $N$ and $M$. We allow the additional feature of discrete torsion and discuss the modification of the consistency conditions arising from tadpole cancellation. We point out the differences between the cases with and without discrete torsion.Comment: 4 pages LaTeX. Write-up of talk at DPF2000, Columbus, OH, August 10, 2000. References adde

Unification with Enlarged Kaluza-Klein Dimensions

In minimal theories with extra spatial dimensions at scales mu_0 much lower than the conventional GUT scale, unification can give too-large predictions for alpha_3(M_Z) given alpha_1(M_Z) and alpha_2(M_Z) as empirical input. We systematically study the effects of adding extra states above the compactification scale on running of the gauge couplings and find several simple examples that give unification where all alpha_i(M_Z) are consistent with low-energy data. We study both the supersymmetric and nonsupersymmetric unification.Comment: 18 pages, LaTeX, analysis for the susy case takes into account that extra hypermultiplets come in conjugate pairs, minor changes in text and references, to be published in Phys. Lett.

Holographic gauge mediation via strongly coupled messengers

We consider a relative of semi-direct gauge mediation where the hidden sector exists at large 't Hooft coupling. Such scenarios can be difficult to describe using perturbative field theory methods but may fall into the class of holographic gauge mediation scenarios, meaning that they are amenable to the techniques of gauge/gravity duality. We use a recently found gravity solution to examine one such case where the hidden sector is a cascading gauge theory resulting in a confinement scale not much smaller than the messenger mass. In the original construction of holographic gauge mediation, as in other examples of semi-direct gauge mediation at strong coupling, the primary contributions to visible sector soft terms come from weakly coupled messenger mesons. In contrast to these examples, we describe the dual of a gauge theory where there are significant contributions from scales where the strongly coupled messenger quarks are the effective degrees of freedom. In this regime, the visible sector gaugino mass can be calculated entirely from holography.Comment: 42 pages, 3 figures, references added, typos and minor errors correcete

Conformal symmetry of brane world effective actions

A simple derivation of the low-energy effective action for brane worlds is given, highlighting the role of conformal invariance. We show how to improve the effective action for a positive- and negative-tension brane pair using the AdS/CFT correspondence.Comment: 5 pages, published versio