Measurements of the Branching Fractions of $B^0 \to$ K*0 $K^{+} K^{-}$, $B^0 \to$ K*0 $\pi^{+} K^{-}$, $B^0 \to$ K*0 $K^{+} \pi^{-}$, and $B^0 \to$ K*0 $\pi^{+} \pi^{-}$

title: Measurement of the CKM matrix element $|V_{ub}|$ with $B \to \rho e \nu$ decays

title: Measurements of branching fractions and CP-violating asymmetries in B-meson decays to the charmless two-body states K0 pi+, anti-K0 K+, and K0 anti-K0

title: Operation of the Cherenkov detector DIRC of BABAR at high luminosity
abstract: The DIRC (acronym for Detection of Internally Reflected Cherenkov (light)) is the ring imaging Cherenkov detector of the BABAR detector at the PEP-II ring of SLAC. It provides the identification of pions, kaons and protons for momenta up to 4 GeV/c with high efficiency. This is needed to reconstruct CP-violating B-decay final states and to provide B-meson flavour tagging for time dependent asymmetry measurements. The DIRC radiators consists of long rectangular bars made of synthetic fused silica and the photon detector is a water tank equipped with an array of 10.752 conventional photomultipliers. At the end of the year 2000 BABAR has recorded about 22 million B~B pairs reaching the design luminosity of L=3/spl middot/10/sup 33//cm/sup 2/s. The ability to keep the beam background level low at highest collision rates and the long term reliability of the DIRC components during continuous data taking are requirements of BABAR to accomplish its physics program.

title: Improved Measurement of CP Violation in Neutral B Decays to c cs

title: Branching fraction for $B^{+} \to \pi^0 \ell^{+} \nu$, measured in $\upsilon_{4S} \to B \bar{B}$ events tagged by $B^{-} \to D^0 \ell^{-}$ anti-v ($X$) decays

title: Level one representations of the simple affine Kac-Moody algebras in their homogeneous gradations
abstract: Using the central charge of the Virasoro algebra as a clue, we recall the known constructions of theA, D, E algebras and discuss new Bosonic constructions of the non simply laced affine Kac-Moody algebras: the twistedA, D, E and theB, C, F, andG algebras. These involve interacting Fermions and a generalization of the Frenkel-Kac sign operators which do not form a 2-cocycle when the horizontal algebra has more than one short simple root.

title: Scrutinizing the Cosmological Constant Problem and a possible resolution
abstract: We suggest a new perspective on the Cosmological Constant Problem by scrutinizing its standard formulation. In classical and quantum mechanics without gravity, there is no definition of the zero point of energy. Furthermore, the Casimir effect only measures how the vacuum energy {\it changes} as one varies a geometric modulus. This leads us to propose that the physical vacuum energy in a Friedman-Lema\^itre-Robertson-Walker expanding universe only depends on the time variation of the scale factor $a(t)$. Equivalently, requiring that empty Minkowski space is gravitationally stable is a principle that fixes the ambiguity in the zero point energy. On the other hand, if there is a meaningful bare cosmological constant, this prescription should be viewed as a fine-tuning. 
We describe two different choices of vacuum, one of which is consistent with the current universe consisting only of matter and vacuum energy. The resulting vacuum energy density $\rhovac$ is constant in time and approximately $k_c^2 H_0^2$, where $k_c$ is a momentum cut-off and $H_0$ is the current Hubble constant; for a cut-off close to the Planck scale, values of $\rhovac$ in agreement with astrophysical measurements are obtained. Another choice of vacuum is more relevant to the early universe consisting of only radiation and vacuum energy, and we suggest it as a possible model of inflation.

title: Conformal field theories in random domains and stochastic Loewner evolutions
abstract: We review the recently developed relation between the traditional algebraic approach to conformal field theories and the more recent probabilistic approach based on stochastic Loewner evolutions. It is based on implementing random conformal maps in conformal field theories.

title: The Large N Random phase sine-Gordon model
abstract: At large distances and in the low-temperature phase, the quenched correlation functions in the 2d random phase sine-Gordon model have been argued to be of the form: , with = (T − Tc). However, renormalization group computations predict B ≠ 0, while variational approaches (which are supposed to be exact for models with a large number of components) give B = 0. We introduce a large-N version of the random phase sine-Gordon model. Using non-Abelian bosonization and renormalization group techniques, we show that the correlation functions of our models have the above form but with a coefficient B suppressed by a factor 1/N3 compared to A.

title: Twisted self-duality of dimensionally reduced gravity and vertex operators
abstract: The Geroch group, isomorphic to the SL(2, R ) affine Kac-Moody group, is an infinite-dimensional solution generating group of Einstein's equations with two surface orthogonal commuting Killing vectors. We introduce another solution generating group for these equations, the dressing group, and discuss its connection with the Geroch group. We show that it acts transitively on a dense subset of moduli space. We use a new Lax pair expressing a twisted self-duality of this system and we study the dressing problem associated to it. We also describe how to use vertex operators to solve the reduced Einstein's equations.