Pair creation of extremal black holes and Kaluza-Klein monopoles.
Classical solutions describing charged dilaton black holes accelerating in a background magnetic field have recently been found. They include the Ernst metric of the Einstein-Maxwell theory as a special case. We study the extremal limit of these solutions in detail, both at the classical and quantum levels. It is shown that near the event horizon the extremal solutions reduce precisely to the static extremal black hole solutions. For a particular value of the dilaton coupling, these extremal black holes are five-dimensional Kaluza-Klein monopoles. The Euclidean sections of these solutions can be interpreted as instantons describing the pair creation of extremal black holes and/or Kaluza-Klein monopoles in a magnetic field. The action of these instantons is calculated and found to agree with the Schwinger result in the weak-field limit. For the Euclidean Ernst solution, the action for the extremal solution differs from that of the previously discussed wormhole instanton by the Bekenstein-Hawking entropy. However, in many cases quantum corrections become large in the vicinity of the black hole, and the precise description of the creation process is unknown.

title: Photoemission “experiments” on holographic superconductors
abstract: We study the effects of a superconducting condensate on holographic Fermi surfaces. With a suitable coupling between the fermion and the condensate, there are stable quasiparticles with a gap. We find some similarities with the phenomenology of the cuprates: in systems whose normal state is a non-Fermi liquid with no stable quasiparticles, a stable quasiparticle peak appears in the condensed phase.

title: Microstates of a neutral black hole in M theory.
abstract: We consider vacuum solutions in M theory of the form of a five-dimensional Kaluza-Klein black hole cross T6. In a certain limit, these include the five-dimensional neutral rotating black hole (cross T6). From a type-IIA standpoint, these solutions carry D0 and D6 charges. We show that there is a simple D-brane description which precisely reproduces the Hawking-Bekenstein entropy in the extremal limit, even though supersymmetry is completely broken.

title: Zero-energy theorem for scale-invariant gravity
abstract: The general scale-invariant Lagrangian, -(1/4) ..integral.. d/sup 4/x(-g)/sup 1/2/(..cap alpha..C/sup munulambdasigma/C/sub munulambda/ /sub sigma/+..beta..R/sup 2/), with ..cap alpha beta..> or =0, is considered. Although this theory admits linearized solutions with negative energy, it is shown that all exact solutions representing isolated systems have precisely zero energy. This result also holds in the presence of arbitrary matter. It can be understood as resulting from a confinement of energy. The implications of this result for quantum gravity are discussed.

title: Where is the information stored in black holes
abstract: It is shown that many modes of the gravitational field exist only inside the horizon of an extreme black hole in string theory. At least in certain cases, the number of such modes is sufficient to account for the Bekenstein-Hawking entropy. These modes are associated with sources which carry Ramond-Ramond charge, and so may be viewed as the strong coupling limit of D-branes. Although these sources naturally live at the singularity, they are well defined and generate modes which extend out to the horizon. This suggests that the information in an extreme black hole is not localized near the singularity or the horizon, but extends between them.

title: Origin of gauge invariance in string theory.
abstract: We present a first quantization of the space-time embedding X/sup ..mu../ and the world-sheet metric rho of the open bosonic string. The world-sheet metric rho decouples from S-matrix elements in 26 dimensions. This formulation of the theory naturally includes 26-dimensional gauge transformations. The gauge invariance of S-matrix elements is a direct consequence of the decoupling of rho. Second quantization leads to a string field Phichemically bondX/sup ..mu../,rhochemically bond with a gauge-covariant equation of motion.

title: Relativistic and nuclear structure effects in parity-violating quasielastic electron scattering.
abstract: The parity-violating longitudinal asymmetry [ital scrA] is calculated for quasielastic electron scattering. We use a varietry of relativistic mean field models for the response of nuclear matter and [sup 12]C at a momentum transfer of [ital q]=550 MeV/[ital c]. Relativistic effects from a reduced nucleon mass, RPA correlations, and vacuum polarization can all change [ital scrA] by a relatively large amount. These large nuclear structure corrections could make it impossible to extract strange quark matrix elements or radiative corrections to weak axial currents.

title: Microscopic relativistic description of proton-nucleus scattering.
abstract: Microscopic relativistic optical potentials have been calculated for closed shell nuclei at energies near 200 MeV. These calculations go beyond the simple RIA by resolving ambiguities in the relativistic NN amplitudes and including Pauli blocking corrections.

title: Role of heavy meson exchange in near threshold NN-->d pi.

title: Isospin-violating meson-nucleon vertices as an alternate mechanism of charge-symmetry breaking.
abstract: We compute isospin-violating meson-nucleon coupling constants and their consequent charge-symmetry-breaking (CSB) nucleon-nucleon potentials. The couplings result from evaluating matrix elements of quark currents between nucleon states in a nonrelativistic constituent quark model; the isospin violations arise from the difference in the up and down constituent quark masses. We find, in particular, that isospin violation in the omega-meson{endash}nucleon vertex dominates the class IV CSB potential obtained from these considerations. We evaluate the resulting spin-singlet{endash}triplet mixing angles, the quantities germane to the difference of neutron and proton analyzing powers measured in elastic {ital n}{searrow}-{ital p}{searrow} scattering, and find them commensurate to those computed originally using the on-shell value of the {rho}-{omega} mixing amplitude. The use of the on-shell {rho}-{omega} mixing amplitude at {ital q}{sup 2}=0 has been called into question; rather, the amplitude is zero in a wide class of models. Our model possesses no contribution from {rho}-{omega} mixing at {ital q}{sup 2}=0, and we find that omega-meson exchange suffices to explain the measured {ital n}-{ital p} analyzing power difference at 183 MeV. {copyright} {ital 1996 The American Physical Society.

title: Meson exchange effects in parity violating electron-deuteron scattering.
abstract: We discuss heavy-meson exchange corrections in the context of parity violating quasielastic electron-deuteron scattering. We compute the meson exchange contributions to the isoscalar vector response function of the deuteron. In contrast to the case of heavy targets the corrections are found to be small.