Related papers: Joseph Polchinski: A Biographical Memoir
Albert Einstein postulated the equivalence of energy and mass, developed the theory of special relativity, explained the photoelectric effect, and described Brownian motion in five papers, all published in 1905, 100 years ago. With these…
One of J. Stuart Dowker's most significant achievements has been to observe that the theory of diffraction by wedges developed a century ago by Sommerfeld and others provided the key to solving two problems of great interest in…
We present a generalization of the string's Polyakov action that describes a conformally invariant four dimensional brane. The new extended object is very different from the traditional D-branes of string theory, but, nevertheless, shares…
In this paper we set up a general formalism to deal with quantum theories on a Lobatchevski space, i.e. a spatial manifold that is homogeneous, isotropic and has negative curvature. The heart of our approach is the construction of a…
The renormalization group (RG) flow for the two-dimensional sine-Gordon model is determined by means of Polchinski's RG equation at next-to-leading order in the derivative expansion. In this work we have two different goals, (i) to consider…
We construct Pleba\'nski-Demia\'nski stationary and axisymmetric solutions with two expanding and double principal null directions in the framework of Metric-Affine gauge theory of gravity. Starting from the new improved form of the metric…
A canonical particle definition via the diagonalisation of the Hamiltonian for a quantum field theory in specific curved space-times is presented. Within the provided approach radial ingoing or outgoing Minkowski particles do not exist. An…
Carlo Cercignani was known all over the world for his works on the Boltzmann equation and on kinetic theory. There was however another aspect of his scientific life, which is not much known. Namely, his interest for the foundations of…
The strong cosmic censorship conjecture, introduced by Penrose five decades ago, asserts that, in self-consistent theories of gravity, Cauchy horizons inside dynamically formed black holes should be unstable to remnant perturbation fields…
The arguments of statistical nature for the existence of constituents of active gravitational masses are presented. The present paper proposes a basis for microscopic theory of universal gravitation. Questions like the relation of…
Between 1972 and 1975, Jacob Bekenstein proposed that black holes possess entropy proportional to their horizon area, and Stephen Hawking derived this relationship from semiclassical quantum field theory in curved spacetime, predicting…
In 1998 astronomers discovered that the expansion of the universe is accelerating. Somehow, something must have made gravity repulsive on cosmological scales. This something was called dark energy; it is described by Einstein's cosmological…
This note is based on a relatively unknown paper of Albert Einstein published in 1941 in the Revista de la Universidad Nacional de Tucuman. That work can be regarded as the prequel of the one written in 1943 in collaboration with Wolfgang…
It is shown, by explicit calculation, that the third-order terms in inverse string length in the spectrum of the effective string theories of Polchinski and Strominger are also the same as in Nambu-Goto theory, in addition to the universal…
Jackiw Teitelboim (JT) gravity has proven to be an excellent tool for investigating aspects of quantum gravity and black hole physics. In recent years, the study of JT gravity and its deformations has helped us learn about the different…
The cosmology of brane induced gravity in six infinite dimensions is investigated. It is shown that a brane with Friedmann-Robertson-Walker symmetries necessarily acts as a source of cylindrically symmetric gravitational waves, so called…
This is mainly a brief review of some key achievements in a `hot'' area of theoretical and mathematical physics. The principal aim is to outline the basic structures underlying {\em integrable} quantum field theory models with {\em…
We retrace the first steps towards understanding neutrinos, particles predicted by Pauli in 1930 to avoid a supposed violation of time-translation symmetry. Despite the tendency to reduce the whole story to his intuition and the skill of…
We consider the quantum gravity and cosmology of a Jordan-Brans-Dicke theory, predicted by string effective actions. We study its canonical formalism and find that the constraint algebra is that of general relativity, as a consequence of…
ECG Stueckelberg (1905-1984) often published important theories years before those who would receive the Nobel Prize for their discoery. Perhpas other jewels may remain the work of this prescient genius. In a short paper in 1957--coming…