We consider circular strings rotating with equal spins $S_1=S_2=S$ in two orthogonal planes in $Ad{S}_5$ and suggest that they may be dual to long gauge-theory operators built out of self-dual components of gauge field strength. As was found in hep-th/0404187, the one-loop anomalous dimensions of the such gauge-theory operators are described by an antiferromagnetic ${\mathrm{XXX}}_1$ spin chain and scale linearly with length $L\gg 1$. We find that in the case of rigid rotating string both the classical energy $E_0$ and the 1-loop string correction $E_1$ depend linearly on the spin $S$ (within the stability region of the solution). This supports the identification of the rigid rotating string with the gauge-theory operator corresponding to the maximal-spin (ferromagnetic) state of the ${\mathrm{XXX}}_1$ spin chain. The energy of more general rotating and pulsating strings also happens to scale linearly with both the spin and the oscillation number. Such solutions should be dual to other lower-spin states of the spin chain, with the antiferromagnetic ground state presumably corresponding to the string pulsating in two planes with no rotation.

We present an ansatz for black 2-branes in five dimensional $\mathcal{N}=2$ supergravity theory that carry magnetic charge with respect to general hypermultiplet scalars. We find explicit solutions in certain special cases and examine the constraints on the general case. These branes may be thought of as arising from M-branes by wrapping 11 dimensional supergravity over special Lagrangian calibrated cycles of a Calabi-Yau $3$-fold.

Motivated by the existence of black holes with various topologies in four-dimensional spacetimes with a negative cosmological constant, we study axisymmetric static solutions describing any large distortions of Schwarzschild-anti-de Sitter black holes parametrized by the mass $m$. Under the approximation such that $m$ is much larger than the anti-de Sitter radius, it is found that a cylindrically symmetric black string is obtained as a special limit of distorted spherical black holes. Such a prolonged distortion of the event horizon connecting a Schwarzschild-anti-de Sitter black hole to a black string is allowed without violating both the usual black hole thermodynamics and the hoop conjecture for the horizon circumference.

Gravitational radiation drives compact binaries through an inspiral phase towards a final coalescence. For binaries with spin, mass quadrupole, and magnetic dipole moments, various contributions add to this process, which is characterized by the rate of increase $df/dt$ of the gravitational wave frequency and the accumulated number $\mathcal{N}$ of gravitational wave cycles. We present here all contributions to $df/dt$ and $\mathcal{N}$ up to the second post-Newtonian order. Among them we give for the first time the contributions due to the self-interaction of individual spins. These are shown to be commensurable with the proper spin-spin contributions for the recently discovered J0737-3039 double pulsar and argued to represent the first corrections to the radiation reaction in the Lense-Thirring approach.

Assuming linearity of the perturbations at the time of decoupling, we reconstruct the primordial scalar potential from the temperature and polarization anisotropies in the cosmic microwave background radiation. In doing so we derive an optimal linear filter which, when operated on the spherical harmonic coefficients of the anisotropy maps, returns an estimate of the primordial scalar potential fluctuations in a spherical slice. The reconstruction is best in a thick shell around the decoupling epoch; the quality of the reconstruction depends on the redshift of the slice within this shell. With high-quality maps of the temperature and polarization anisotropies it will be possible to obtain a reconstruction of potential fluctuation on scales between $\ell =2$ and $\ell \sim 300$ at the redshift of decoupling, with some information about the three-dimensional shapes of the perturbations in a shell of width 250 Mpc.

The smallness of the baryon asymmetry in our universe is one of the greatest mysteries and may originate from some profound physics beyond the standard model. We investigate the Affleck-Dine baryogenesis in split supersymmetry, and find that the smallness of the baryon asymmetry is directly related to the hierarchy between the supersymmetry breaking squark/slepton masses and the weak scale. Put simply, the baryon asymmetry is small because of the split mass spectrum.

We show that the one-loop ghost self-energy in an equivariantly gauge-fixed Yang-Mills theory vanishes at zero momentum. A ghost mass is forbidden by equivariant BRST symmetry, and our calculation confirms this explicitly. The four-ghost self interaction which appears in the equivariantly gauge-fixed Yang-Mills theory is needed in order to obtain this result.

We show that the magnetic monopole promoted to the dyon due to the vacuum angle $\theta$ resolves the U(1) problem in the sense that the dyon obtained in this way gives a dominant contribution to the topological susceptibility. For this purpose, we derive an Abelian-projected effective gauge theory written in terms of Abelian degrees of freedom, which is obtained by integrating out all the off-diagonal degrees of freedom involved in the SU(2) Yang-Mills theory with the vacuum angle $\theta$. We evaluate the topological susceptibility by estimating the classical part of the effective dyon action obtained by performing the duality transformation. The obtained result is consistent with the Veneziano-Witten formula.

The Collins fragmentation function describes a left/right asymmetry in the fragmentation of a transversely polarized quark into a hadron in a jet. Four different model calculations of the Collins function have been presented in the literature. While based on the same concepts, they lead to different results and, in particular, to different signs for the Collins function. The purpose of the present work is to review the features of these models and correct some errors made in previous calculations. A full study of the parameter dependence and the possible modifications to these models is beyond the scope of the paper. However, some general conclusions are drawn.

We consider the $B\to \pi \pi$ and $B\to \pi \rho ,\pi \omega$ decays alongside each other, taking into account the contributions from all individual penguin amplitudes generated by the internal $t$, $c$, and $u$ quarks. We argue that three ratios of penguin amplitudes, each for a different internal quark, formed by dividing the individual penguin amplitude in $B\to \pi \pi$ by the corresponding amplitude in $B\to \pi \rho ,\pi \omega$, should be equal. We study the implications of the assumed existence of this connection between $B\to \pi \pi$ and $B\to \pi \rho ,\pi \omega$. First, accepting that in the $B\to \pi \pi$ decays the ratio $C/T$ of the color-suppressed factorization amplitude $C$ to the tree factorization amplitude $T$ is negligible, we determine the ratio of individual penguin amplitudes. Then, from the $B\to \pi \rho ,\pi \omega$ data, we extract the effective (i.e. possibly containing some penguin terms) tree and the effective color-suppressed amplitudes relevant for these processes, and the corresponding solutions for the factorization amplitudes. Finally, we argue that the $C/T$ ratio in $B\to \pi \pi$ should be identical to its counterpart in $B\to \pi \rho ,\pi \omega$ (relevant for pion emission from the decaying $b$ quark). This constraint permits the determination of $C/T$ and of other amplitude ratios directly from the data. Although the $|C/T|$ ratio extracted from the available data still carries a substantial error, it is consistent with the expected value of 0.25–0.5.

We analyze the supersymmetric contributions to the $B\to K\pi$ process. We show that the simultaneous contributions from the penguin diagrams with chargino and gluino in the loop could lead to a possible solution to the $B\to K\pi$ puzzle. Our result indicates that including the stringent constraint from the $b\to s\gamma$ branching ratio, the supersymmeteric models with light right-handed top-squark and large mixing between second and third generation of up and down squarks is the most preferred by the current experimental data.

Mass of the excited $(1^{-},2^{-})$, $(2^{-},3^{-})$ and $(2^{+},3^{+})$ $c\overline{s}$ states is calculated to the $1/m_Q$ order within the framework of the heavy quark effective theory using QCD sum rule method. The obtained kinetic energy is comparable to the $c$-quark mass, thus results in large $1/m_Q$ correction for the $c$-quark case. With the sum rules for the chromomagnetic interaction term, the mass splitting for the three doublets is presented. Based on the predicted mass spectrum the exotic $D_{sJ}(2632)$ state, if really exists, is unlikely to be a conventional orbitally higher excited $c\overline{s}$ state, although the experimental center lies within the range for the mass of the $1^{-}$ meson.

We consider four lepton-number violating ($\mathrm{L̸}$) processes: (a) neutrinoless double-beta decay $(0\nu \beta \beta )$, (b) $\Delta L=2$ tau decays, (c) $\Delta L=2$ rare meson decays and (d) nuclear muon-positron conversion. In the absence of exotic $\mathrm{L̸}$ interactions, the rates for these processes are determined by effective neutrino masses $⟨m{⟩}_{{\ell }_1{\ell }_2}$, which can be related to the sum of light neutrino masses, the neutrino mass-squared differences, the neutrino mixing angles, a Dirac phase and two Majorana phases. We sample the experimentally allowed ranges of $⟨m{⟩}_{{\ell }_1{\ell }_2}$ based on neutrino oscillation experiments as well as cosmological observations, and obtain a stringent upper bound $⟨m{⟩}_{{\ell }_1{\ell }_2}\lesssim 0.14\mathrm{eV}$. We then calculate the allowed ranges for $⟨m{⟩}_{{\ell }_1{\ell }_2}$ from the experimental rates of direct searches for the above $\Delta L=2$ processes. Comparing our calculated rates with the currently or soon available data, we find that only the $0\nu \beta \beta$ experiment may be able to probe $⟨m{⟩}_{ee}$ with a sensitivity comparable to the current bound. Muon-positron conversion is next in sensitivity, while the limits of direct searches for the other $\Delta L=2$ processes are several orders of magnitude weaker than the current bounds on $⟨m{⟩}_{{\ell }_1{\ell }_2}$. Any positive signal in those direct searches would indicate new contributions to the $\mathrm{L̸}$ interactions beyond those from three light Majorana neutrinos.

We present a combined analysis of fully-contained, partially-contained and upward-going muon atmospheric neutrino data from a 1489 d exposure of the Super-Kamiokande detector. The data samples span roughly five decades in neutrino energy, from 100 MeV to 10 TeV. A detailed Monte Carlo comparison is described and presented. The data is fit to the Monte Carlo expectation, and is found to be consistent with neutrino oscillations of ${\nu }_{\mu }\leftrightarrow {\nu }_{\tau }$ with ${sin}^{2}2\theta >0.92$ and $1.5\times {10}^{-3}<\Delta m^2<3.4\times {10}^{-3}{\mathrm{eV}}^2$ at 90% confidence level.

We measure the hadronic branching ratios of the $Z^0$ boson into heavy quarks: $R_b={\Gamma }_{Z^0\to b\overline{b}}/{\Gamma }_{Z^0\to \mathrm{hadrons}}$ and $R_c={\Gamma }_{Z^0\to c\overline{c}}/{\Gamma }_{Z^0\to \mathrm{hadrons}}$ using a multitag technique. The measurement was performed using about 400 000 hadronic $Z^0$ events recorded in the SLC Large Detector experiment at SLAC between 1996 and 1998. The small and stable SLAC Linear Collider beam spot and the CCD-based vertex detector were used to reconstruct bottom and charm hadron decay vertices with high efficiency and purity, which enables us to measure most efficiencies from data. We obtain, $R_b=0.21604\pm 0.00098(\mathrm{stat}.)\pm 0.00073(\mathrm{syst}.)\mp 0.00012(R_c)$ and, $R_c=0.1744\pm 0.0031(\mathrm{stat}.)\pm 0.0020(\mathrm{syst}.)\mp 0.0006(R_b)$.

We present long-term-stable and convergent evolutions of head-on black-hole collisions and extraction of gravitational waves generated during the merger and subsequent ring-down. The new ingredients in this work are the use of fixed mesh-refinement and dynamical singularity excision techniques. We are able to carry out head-on collisions with large initial separations and demonstrate that our excision infrastructure is capable of accommodating the motion of the individual black holes across the computational domain as well as their merger. We extract gravitational waves from these simulations using the Zerilli-Moncrief formalism and find the ring-down radiation to be, as expected, dominated by the $\ell =2$, $m=0$ quasinormal mode. The total radiated energy is about $0.1\%$ of the total Arnowitt-Deser-Misner mass of the system.

For cosmologies including scale dependence of both the cosmological and the gravitational constant, an additional consistency condition dictated by the Bianchi identities emerges, even if the energy-momentum tensor of ordinary matter stays individually conserved. For renormalization-group (RG) approaches it is shown that such a consistency relation ineluctably fixes the RG scale (which may have an explicit as well as an implicit time dependence), provided that the solutions of the RG equation for both quantities are known. Hence, contrary to the procedures employed in the recent literature, we argue that there is no more freedom in identification of the RG scale in terms of the cosmic time in such cosmologies. We carefully set the RG scale for the RG evolution phrased in a quantum-gravity framework based on the hypothetical existence of an infrared fixed point, for the perturbative regime within the same framework, as well as for an evolution within quantum field theory in a curved background. In the latter case, the implications of the scale setting for the particle spectrum are also briefly discussed.

Improved semiclassical techniques are developed and applied to a treatment of a real scalar field in a $D$-dimensional gravitational background. This analysis, leading to a derivation of the thermodynamics of black holes, is based on the simultaneous use of (i) a near-horizon description of the scalar field in terms of conformal quantum mechanics; (ii) a novel generalized WKB framework; and (iii) curved-spacetime phase-space methods. In addition, this improved semiclassical approach is shown to be asymptotically exact in the presence of hierarchical expansions of a near-horizon type. Most importantly, this analysis further supports the claim that the thermodynamics of black holes is induced by their near-horizon conformal invariance.

This is the sequel to the first paper of the series, where we have discussed the Hawking radiation from five-dimensional rotating black holes for spin 0, $1/2$, and 1 brane fields in the low frequency regime. We consider the emission of a brane-localized scalar field from rotating black holes in general space-time dimensions without relying on the low frequency expansions.