Quantum probes of spacetime singularities.
It is shown that there are static spacetimes with timelike curvature singularities which appear completely nonsingular when probed with quantum test particles. Examples include extreme dilatonic black holes and the fundamental string solution. In these spacetimes, the dynamics of quantum particles is well defined and uniquely determined.

title: Pair creation of extremal black holes and Kaluza-Klein monopoles.
abstract: 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: 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: 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: 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: 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: 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: Dynamical color correlations in a SU(2)c quark exchange model of nuclear matter.
abstract: The quark exchange model is a simple realization of an adiabatic approximation to the strong-coupling limit of quantum chromodynamics: the quarks always coalesce into the lowest energy set of flux tubes. Nuclear matter is thus modeled in terms of its quarks. We wish to study the correlations imposed by total wave-function antisymmetry when color degrees of freedom are included. To begin with, we have considered one-dimensional matter with a SU(2) color internal degree of freedom only. We proceed by constructing a totally antisymmetric, color singlet [ital Ansatz] characterized by a variational parameter [lambda] (which describes the length scale over which two quarks in the system are clustered into hadrons) and by performing a variational Monte Carlo calculation of the energy to optimize [lambda] for a fixed density. We calculate the [ital q]-[ital q] correlation function as well, and discuss the qualitative differences between the system at low and high density.

title: Nuclear to quark-matter transition in the string-flip model.
abstract: We have calculated ground-state properties of nuclear matter in a simple string-flip quark model in one dimension. Special emphasis was placed on the transition from hadron to quark matter and to the response of the system to color fields. Numerical simulations involving a large number of quarks were carried out for two- and three-quark clusters. This in turn enabled us to investigate the hadron-to-quark transition through the study of finite-size effects. The concept of a sudden-quark potential was introduced as an example of a generic response of the medium to color fields. We have argued that this response might be relevant to the propagation of a rapidly moving quark-antiquark pair (e.g., J/ψ meson) through the medium

title: Hadron structure in a simple model of quark/nuclear matter.
abstract: We study a simple model for one-dimensional hadron matter with many of the essential features needed for examining the transition from nuclear to quark matter and the limitations of models based upon hadron rather than quark degrees of freedom. The dynamics are generated entirely by the quark confining force and exchange symmetry. Using Monte Carlo techniques, the ground-state energy, single-quark momentum distribution, and quark correlation function are calculated for uniform matter as a function of density. The quark confinement scale in the medium increases substantially with increasing density. This change is evident in the correlation function and momentum distribution, in qualitative agreement with the changes observed in deep-inelastic lepton scattering. Nevertheless, the ground-state energy is smooth throughout the transition to quark matter and is described remarkably well by an effective hadron theory based on a phenomenological hadron-hadron potential.

title: Role of heavy-meson exchange in pion production near threshold.
abstract: Recent calculations of s-wave pion production have severely underestimated the accurately known pp → pp� 0 total cross section near threshold. In these calculations, only the single-nucleon axial-charge operator is considered. We have calculated, in addition to the one-body term, the two-body contributions to this reaction that arise from the exchange of mesons. We find that the inclusion of the scalar �-meson exchange current (and lesser contributions from other mesons) increases the cross section by about a factor of five, and leads to excellent agreement with the data. The results are neither very sensitive to changes in the distorting potential that generates the NN wave function, nor to different choices for the meson-nucleon form factors. We argue that pp → pp� 0 data provide direct experimental evidence for meson