Related papers: Unfortunate Terminology
To describe a massive graviton in 4D Minkowski space-time one introduces a quadratic term in the Lagrangian. This term, however, can lead to a readjustment or instability of the background instead of describing a massive graviton on flat…
The Randall-Sundrum model of warped geometry in a five-dimensional scenario, aimed at explaining the hierarchy between the Planck and electroweak scales, is intrinsically unstable in its minimal form due to negative tension of the visible…
Einstein's relativity theory appears to be very accurate, but at times equally puzzling. On the one hand, electromagnetic radiation must have zero rest mass in order to propagate at the speed of light, but on the other hand, since it…
We revisit the concept of de Sitter (dS) 'tachyonic' scalar fields, characterized by discrete negative squared mass values, and assess their physical significance through a rigorous Wigner-inspired group-theoretical analysis. This…
The traditional interpretation of radiative emission and absorption asserts that photons are created and annihilated in such processes. A Gedanken experiment is considered in which kinetic energy from observed photons is systematically…
Beyond black holes and neutron stars, new hypothetical compact objects have been proposed as potential astrophysical entities. In general, their properties have not yet been fully explored or understood, nor has it been proven whether or…
We show that non-zero masses for a spin-1 graviton (called graviphoton) leads to considerable gravitomagnetic fields around rotating mass densities, which are not observed. The solution to the problem is found by an equivalent graviphoton…
States of particles with negative energies are considered for the nonrelativistic and relativistic cases. In nonrelativistic case it is shown that the decays close to the attracting center can lead to the situation similar to the Penrose…
We suggest the existence of systems in which the statistics of a particle changes with the quantum level it occupies. The occupation numbers in thermal equilibrium depend on a continuous statistical parameter that interpolates between…
The missing mass refers to the probability of elements not observed in a sample, and since the work of Good and Turing during WWII, has been studied extensively in many areas including ecology, linguistic, networks and information theory.…
The hypothesis that neutrinos are massive has a strong experimental support; however, the information we have is quite limited, and many possibilities are open. Theoretical considerations might help fill the gaps (or foresee regularities),…
Electrons interact strongly with their environment. The result of these interactions is, most of the time, encoded in an effective mass. In non-relativistic systems, as in condensed matter, the electrons plus interactions form a…
We begin by reviewing the results on the decay of unstable D-branes in type II string theory, and the open-closed string duality proposal that arises from these studies. We then apply this proposal to the study of tachyon driven cosmology,…
Relativistic effects affect nearly all notions of quantum information theory. The vacuum behaves as a noisy channel, even if the detectors are perfect. The standard definition of a reduced density matrix fails for photon polarization…
In many phenomenologically interesting models of thermal leptogenesis the heavy neutrinos are non-relativistic when they decay and produce the baryon asymmetry of the Universe. We propose a non-relativistic approximation for the…
We explore the limits on neutrino mass which follow from a study of the long-range forces that arise from the exchange of massless or ultra-light neutrinos. Although the 2-body neutrino-exchange force is unobservably small, the many-body…
Recent attempts to explain the dark matter and energy content of the universe have involved some radical extensions of standard physics, including quintessence, phantom energy, additional space dimensions and variations in the speed of…
The recently found non-BPS multi-wall configurations in the N=1 supergravity in four dimensions is shown to have no tachyonic scalar fluctuations without additional stabilization mechanisms. Mass of radion (lightest massive fluctuation) is…
Our concept of mass has evolved considerably over the centuries, most notably from Newton to Einstein, and then even more vigorously with the establishment of the standard model and the subsequent discovery of the Higgs boson. Mass is now…
It is firmly established by experimental results that neutrinos are almost 100\% longitudinally polarized and left-handed. It is also confirmed by neutrino oscillation experiments that neutrinos have tiny but non-zero masses. Since their…