Strongly coupled quarks in the standard model.
For sufficiently strong Yukawa couplings the standard model goes over to the linear sigma model. We point out that the associated heavy quarks may behave like strongly interacting low-energy u and d quarks so one cannot argue that very-heavy-quark systems will provide an easy test of QCD. An upper-quark-mass bound of about 1.5 TeV is found. This should also apply to techniquarks.) Experimental confirmation of the scheme might come from the observation of very tightly bound baryons made from three heavy quarks.

title: LASER WELDING OF STEEL PLATES WITH UNMACHINED EDGES

title: Beam commissioning of the PEP-II High Energy Ring
abstract: The PEP-II High Energy Ring (HER), a 9 GeV electron storage ring, has been in commissioning since spring 1997. Initial beam commissioning activities focused on systems checkout and commissioning and on determining the behaviour of the machine systems at high beam currents, This phase culminated with the accumulation of 0.75 A of stored beam-sufficient to achieve design luminosity-in January 1998 after 3.5 months of beam time. Collisions with the 3 GeV positron beam of the Low Energy Ring (LER) were achieved in Summer of 1998. At high beam currents, collective instabilities have been seen. Since then, commissioning activities for the HER have shifted in focus towards characterization of the machine and a rigorous program to understand the machine and the beam dynamics is presently underway.

title: Chandra observations of the nearby spiral galaxy NGC6503
abstract: We have observed the nearby spiral galaxy NGC6503 using Chandra. Seven discrete sources associated with the galaxy have been found, one of them coincident with its Liner-starburst nucleus. One of the sources corresponds to a ULX with Lx >~ 10e39 ergs/s. Previous ROSAT observations of the galaxy show that this source has varied by at least a factor 3 in the last 6 years. No evidence is found for strong diffuse emission in the nuclear region or the presence of a low luminosity AGN.

title: Investigating the process of star formation in young LMC star clusters
abstract: The rich star clusters in the Large Magellanic Cloud (LMC) are ideal for studying the process of star formation. Here we focus on the determination of age spreads amongst the massive stars in two young clusters, NGC1818 and NGC1805. We present colour magnitude diagrams (derived from HST data) for these clusters, and discuss the difficulties in age spread determination.

title: A hamiltonian structure from gauge transformations of the Zakharov-Shabat system
abstract: We study a hamiltonian structure for nonlinear evolution equations arising from a class of gauge transformations of the Zakharov-Shabat system.

title: Measurement of the mass of the tau lepton.
abstract: The mass of the [tau] lepton has been measured at the Beijing Electron-Positron Collider using the Beijing Spectrometer. A search near threshold for [ital e][sup +][ital e[minus]][r arrow][tau][sup +][tau][sup [minus]] was performed. Candidate events were identified by requiring that one [tau] decay via [tau][r arrow][ital e][nu][bar ], and the other via [tau][r arrow][mu][nu][bar [nu]]. The mass value, obtained from a fit to the energy dependence of the [tau][sup +][tau][sup [minus]] cross section, is [ital m][sub [tau]]=1776.9[sub [minus]0.5][sup +0.4][plus minus]0.2 MeV.

title: A new collider upgrade proposal: Increasing the pbar-p collider energy

title: Experimental investigation of nonlinear dynamics in the Fermilab Tevatron.
abstract: The nonlinear dynamics of transverse particle oscillations in the Tevatron is studied experimentally and compared with prediction. Accurate measurements of various phase-space features are obtained. A theoretically expected metastable state of the accelerator, with particles captured on nonlinear resonance islands, is demonstrated experimentally, and stability of the state is investigated.

title: Taub-NUT dyons in heterotic string theory.
abstract: Starting with the Taub--NUT solution to Einstein's equations, together with a constant dilaton, a dyonic Taub--NUT solution of low energy heterotic string theory with non--trivial dilaton, axion and $U(1)$ gauge fields is constructed by employing $O(1,1)$ transformations. The electromagnetic dual of this solution is constructed, using $SL(2,\rline)$ transformations. By an appropriate change to scaled variables, the extremal limit of the dual solution is shown to correspond to the low energy limit of an exact conformal field theory presented previously.

title: Double analog state in odd-A nuclei.
abstract: Measurements were performed using pion double charge exchange to observe the double isobaric analog state (DIAS) in the odd-[ital A] nuclei [sup 54]V, [sup 59]Co, [sup 115]In, and [sup 197]Au. These results are combined with data for other odd-[ital A] targets and used to investigate the [ital N], [ital Z], and [ital A] dependence of DIAS cross sections.