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Recent posts
Quantum tunneling in flux compactifications
I am very happy to find myself writing a blog about a recent paper written by Jose Juan Blanco-Pillado, Alex Vilenkin and myself, and titled “Quantum tunneling in flux compactifications“. In this paper we studied bubble nucleation rates in a 6-dimensional Einstein-Maxwell theory. The two extra dimensions are compactified into a 2-sphere, and their radius [...]
A bound on the speed of sound from holography?
This post is authored by Aleksey Cherman (on the left) and Abhinav Nellore (on the right). Aleksey is a graduate student in the nuclear theory group at the University of Maryland, College Park, working with Tom Cohen, and Abhi is a graduate student in Steve Gubser’s group at Princeton. Dmitry. We all know that sound [...]
The in-in formalism and cosmological perturbations
This post is written by two great guys Peter Adshead (his photo is on the left) and Eugene Lim (on the right). Peter is a PhD student of Richard Easther at Yale U., while Eugene is Richard’s former postdoc now working at Columbia U. Dmitry. The discovery of the anisotropies in the cosmic microwave background [...]
On Moore-Read states
I always find quite exciting when fundamental (and sometime abstract) results of pure mathematics and quantum field theory can be directly related to condensed matter or statistical mechanics problems with a clear physical interpretation and motivation. For instance, in our recent paper on “Clustering properties, Jack polynomials and unitary conformal field theories” (arXiv:0904.3702), we study [...]
Fermionic Schwinger-Keldysh propagators from AdS/CFT
Gregory Giecold is a PhD student at CEA, Saclay. Dmitry. In this post I will describe recent work on fermionic Schwinger-Keldysh propagators from AdS/CFT. For further details and references see ArXiv: 0904.4869. A formulation of the AdS/CFT correspondence relates correlators of a quantum field theory at strong coupling to the boundary behaviour of bulk classical [...]
Two levels of irony of waterboarding
Started here systematically reading “Huffington press” – thinking that maybe it will allow me to develop my language skills a bit… The hot topic there nowadays is waterboarding – can it be really considered torture or not? And if this is torture, is it really acceptable to use torture against enemies of the State – [...]
Deflation and credit compression for dummies
The goal of this post is to explain at maximally comprehensive level why everybody on the other side of Atlantic is currently afraid of deflation. So, here you go. We will start giving the answer to a somewhat simpler question: how do banks make money from air? Suppose you are in possession of 100000 USD. [...]
Nanotechnology in space
Sorry, cannot help sharing it with you (bold below is mine): Pyongyang, May 7 (KCNA) — A spokesman for the Korean Committee of Space Technology issued a statement on Thursday, one month after satellite Kwangmyongsong-2 started its normal operation after being put into orbit. It says: As already reported, scientists and technicians of the DPRK [...]
Nanotechnology for fun and profit: video of the day
This is a 50 min lecture about new nanotechnologies (carbon nanotubes, in particular) by Ray Baughman given at Carnegie Mellon U. As you may know, Russian government plans starting large scale investing into nanotechnology and have already organized a company (Rusnano, formely Rosnanotech) to channel government investments. The head of the company is Anatoly Chubais, [...]
(In)visible Z’ and dark matter
Alberto Romagnoni is a postdoc at LPT, Orsay. Dmitry. In this post I discuss my recent work “(In)visible Z’ and dark matter”, done in collaboration with E. Dudas, Y. Mambrini and S. Pokorski. I think there are two main messages I should stress to summarize our paper. The first one is more interesting for its phenomenological [...]
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Large non-Gaussianity from axion inflation
January 31, 2012 14:01 -
On strong disorder renormalization
March 18, 2011 20:03 -
Relaunching NEQNET
January 20, 2011 21:01 -
Saturday’s photoguess: what does this monkey symbolize?
June 20, 2009 19:06 -
Dynamics of space storm
June 19, 2009 12:06
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Micro: Can 2 question provide a common solution? Black holes, information loss paradox and Ultra high energy cosmic rays. ...
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James Ph. Kotsybar: SAGITTARIUS A* -- James Ph. Kotsybar Mysteriously cloaked, obscure despite Interior illuminating glare, Long ...
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cad: The presentation can be found in several formats at http://pirsa.org/08110051/...
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Leo: Ok I have a question: if a black hole is supermassive, say 100 billion solar mass, let's suppose Alice fells int...
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superkuh: I am glad you are back! No more disapointing weekly refreshings of that monkey....
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Ariel Amir: Very interesting, thanks. It indeed seems to be very close to what we discuss here. I wonder whether the distributi...
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