Status of the PLS-II Synchrotron Light Source
Pohang light source (PLS) had been operated for 14 years successfully. The number of beamlines of PLS was two at the beginning stage. The number of beam-lines has been increased two or three every year. And the total beam-lines in operation became 28 in 2010 and 3199 users had visited PAL for their experiments . The user community gradually extended and they became to require brighter beam to see small signal from a sample. To meet this requirement of the user community, the PLS machine was upgraded as PLS-II. The main goals of the PLS-II machine are to increase the beam energy from 2.5 to 3 GeV, and to increase the number of insertion device (ID) by the factor of two (20 IDs). This PLS-II upgrade project had been completed in 2011 and user service has been started in 2012. We will report the current status of PLS-II machine in this paper.

title: Quantum entanglement from the holographic principle
abstract: It is suggested that quantum entanglement emerges from the holographic principle stating that all of the information of a region (bulk bits) can be described by the bits on its boundary surface. There are redundancy and information loss in the bulk bits that lead to the nonlocal correlation among the bulk bits. Quantum field theory overestimates the independent degrees of freedom in the bulk. The maximum entanglement in the universe increases as the size of the cosmic horizon and this could be related with the arrow of time and dark energy.

title: Dark energy from forgetting
abstract: We suggest that dark energy has a quantum informational origin. Landauer's principle associated with the erasure of quantum information at a cosmic horizon implies the non-zero vacuum energy having effective negative pressure. Assuming the holographic principle, the minimum free energy condition, and the Gibbons-Hawking temperature for the cosmic event horizon we obtain the holographic dark energy with the parameter $d\simeq 1$, which is consistent with the current observational data. It is also shown that both the entanglement energy and the horizon energy can be related to Landauer's principle.

title: Black Hole as an Information Eraser
abstract: We discuss the identity of black hole entropy and show that the first law of black hole thermodynamics, in the case of a Schwarzschild black hole, can be derived from Landauer's principle by assuming that the black hole is one of the most efficient information erasers. The term "most efficient" implies that maximal information will be erased for a given amount of work. We calculate the discrete mass spectra and the entropy of a Schwarzschild black hole assuming that the black hole processes information in unit of bits. The black hole entropy acquires a subleading contribution proportional to the logarithm of its mass-squared in addition to the usual mass-squared term without an artificial cutoff. We also argue that the minimum of the black hole mass is $\sqrt{\log 2/(8\pi)}M_{\rm P}$.

title: Zero cosmological constant and nonzero dark energy from the holographic principle
abstract: The first law of thermodynamics and the holographic principle applied to an arbitrary large cosmic causal horizon are shown to naturally demand a zero cosmological constant and a non-zero dynamical dark energy in the form of the holographic dark energy. A semiclassical analysis shows that the holographic dark energy has a parameter d = 1 and an equation of state comparable to current observational data if the entropy of the horizon saturates the Bekenstein-Hawking bound. This result indicates that quantum field theory should be modified on a large scale to explain the dark energy. The relations among the dark energy, the quantum vacuum energy and the entropic gravity are also discussed.

title: Radiation Damping at a Bubble Wall
abstract: The first order phase transition proceeds via nucleation and growth of true vacuum bubbles. When charged particles collide with the bubble they could radiate electromagnetic wave. We show that, due to an energy loss of the particles by the radiation, the damping pressure acting on the bubble wall depends on the velocity of the wall even in a thermal equilibrium state.

title: Stellar Variability of the Exoplanet Hosting Star HD 63454
abstract: Of the hundreds of exoplanets discovered using the radial velocity (RV) technique, many are orbiting close to their host stars with periods less than 10 days. One of these, HD 63454, is a young active K dwarf which hosts a Jovian planet in a 2.82 day period orbit. The planet has a 14% transit probability and a predicted transit depth of 1.2%. Here we provide a re-analysis of the RV data to produce an accurate transit ephemeris. We further analyze 8 nights of time series data to search for stellar activity both intrinsic to the star and induced by possible interactions of the exoplanet with the stellar magnetospheres. We establish the photometric stability of the star at the 3 mmag level despite strong Ca II emission in the spectrum. Finally, we rule out photometric signatures of both star-planet magnetosphere interactions and planetary transit signatures. From this we are able to place constraints on both the orbital and physical properties of the planet.

title: The Variation of Relative Magnetic Helicity around Major Flares
abstract: We have investigated the variation of magnetic helicity over a span of several days around the times of 11 X-class flares which occurred in seven active regions (NOAA 9672, 10030, 10314, 10486, 10564, 10696, and 10720) using the magnetograms taken by the Michelson Doppler Imager (MDI) on board the Solar and Heliospheric Observatory (SOHO). As a major result we found that each of these major flares was preceded by a significant helicity accumulation, (1.8–16) × 1042 Mx2 over a long period (0.5 to a few days). Another finding is that the helicity accumulates at a nearly constant rate, (4.5–48) × 1040 Mx2 hr−1, and then becomes nearly constant before the flares. This led us to distinguish the helicity variation into two phases: a phase of monotonically increasing helicity and the following phase of relatively constant helicity. As expected, the amount of helicity accumulated shows a modest correlation with time-integrated soft X-ray flux during flares. However, the average helicity change rate in the first phase shows even stronger correlation with the time-integrated soft X-ray flux. We discuss the physical implications of this result and the possibility that this characteristic helicity variation pattern can be used as an early warning sign for solar eruptions.

title: Status of Rare Isotope Science Project in Korea
abstract: The Rare Isotope Science Project (RISP) is launched in Korea to build the IF and ISOL facilities. Current status of RISP is introduced.

title: Recent Developments in Heavy-Quarkonium Phenomenology
abstract: We review recent developments in heavy-quarkonium phenomenology within the nonrelativistic QCD factorization approach. Main issues we consider in this work include the polarization of prompt J / ψ at the Fermilab Tevatron and the large relativistic and QCD corrections to double-charmonium production at the B factories. We also consider inclusive charm production in bottomonia decays.

title: Exclusive double charmonium production from e+ e- annihilation into two virtual photons
abstract: We calculate the contributions from QED processes involving two virtual photons to the cross sections for e + e annihilation into two charmonium states with the same C-parity. Generically, the cross sections are three orders of magnitude smaller than those for charmonia with opposite C-parity because they are suppressed by a factor of � 2 /� 2 . However, if both charmonia have quantum numbers J PC = 1 , then there is a contribution to the cross section that involves the fragmentation of each photon into a charmonium. The fragmentation contribution is enhanced by powers of Ebeam/mc, the ratio of the beam energy to the charm-quark mass, and this enhancement can compensate for the suppression factor that is associated with the coupling constants. In particular, the predicted cross section for J/ + J/ at the B factories is larger than that for J/ +�c.