Dmitry Podolsky has got his PhD from Landau Institute for Theoretical Physics. He currently works as postdoc at Case Western Reserve University. He is also one of the editors of NEQNET.

30. Eye on ArXiv: 30 Apr 2008 – Effective QFT for inflation

Today, I think, the most interesting paper in ArXiv is the one by Steven Weinberg called “Effective field theory for inflation“. I would say, it generalizes results by Cheung et al. (their paper has a somewhat similar title ) to larger effective cutoffs. The motivation to discuss effective QFT for inflation is simple. Let us [...]

29. Eye on ArXiv: 28 Apr 2008 – D3/D7 brane inflation

I would like to briefly discuss the paper Michael Haack, Renata Kallosh, Axel Krause, Andrei Linde, Dieter Lust, Marco Zagermann, “Update of D3/D7-Brane Inflation on K3 x T^2/Z_2″ released last friday. As follows from the title, the paper is about inflationary scenario ( and it is huge). The scenario works as follows: D3 and D7 [...]

28. Eye on ArXiv: 24 Apr 2008 – dS vacua in no-scale SUGRA; multifield DBI inflation

Laura Covi et al., de Sitter vacua in no-scale supergravities and Calabi-Yau string models; D. Langlois et al., Primordial fluctuations and non-Gaussianities in multi-field DBI inflation

27. Eye on ArXiv: 24 Apr 2008 – Detection of dark matter?

There was a lot of buzz recently (including the paper in New York Times) concerning the claim by DAMA/LIBRA team – they detected dark matter interactions with their detector at the level of 8 sigma Their approach is the following: they try to find annual modulations in their DM signal (interaction of WIMPs with the [...]

26. Eye on ArXiv: 24 Apr 2008 – NSR superstring measures

Today I decided to split my review of new papers in archives which were of interest to me into separate posts. This will actually force me to read each paper more carefully and hopefully will also increase the quality of the review I will start with reviewing the paper by A.Morozov, “NSR Superstring Measures Revisited” [...]

25. Geometry and causal structure of de Sitter space (Inflationary perturbations 4)

I discuss geometry, causal structure and behavior of QFT Green functions in de Sitter space

24. Inflation: description in terms of hydrodynamics (Inflationary perturbations 4)

This post continues my lecture notes on large scale structure, cosmological perturbations and inflation. The last post in this series was about the problem of initial conditions in FRW cosmology. As we have found out, standard Hot Big Bang model with power law expansion is unable to explain present degree of homogeneity and isotropy of [...]

23. Eye on ArXiv: 21 Apr 2008 – SUSY/non-SUSY duality

And so the new week began… Would be fun to finish another paper till Friday (the subject is “IR divergencies in de Sitter space”). In the mean time, let us take a closer look on some papers released to arxives during the previous week. 1. Mina Aganagic, Christopher Beem, Jihye Seo, Cumrun Vafa, “Extended Supersymmetric [...]

22. About decoherence in quasi de Sitter space

My discussion of disorder on the landscape with Lubos continues (L – Lubos, D – me). L: So if I understand well, your degree of freedom is really the inflaton phi, and it is one degree of freedom per Hubble patch, with one expectation value and one variation. The value of the inflaton is assumed [...]

21. About probabilities in cosmology (and general) and in stochastic inflation in particular

Discussion was initiated by the question “what is the physical meaning of time in vacuum dynamics equations” that was smoothly transformed into the question “what is the meaning of probability in the vacuum dynamics equations”. My answer was that is the world time for the 4-dim observer and is the probability for him to measure a given value of the cosmological constant. Lubos replied: