Quasielastic proton-nucleus scattering in a relativistic plane-wave impulse approximation.
Proton-nucleus quasielastic scattering cross sections and spin observables are calculated in a relativistic plane-wave impulse approximation for nuclei from $^{12}\mathrm{C}$ to $^{208}\mathrm{Pb}$ at energies of 300 to 800 MeV. Relativistic effects are incorporated by using Dirac spinors with enhanced lower components characterized by an effective mass from 0.8 to 0.9M. The analyzing power is found to decrease significantly from free NN values when relativistic spinors are used. This reduction is in good agreement with data. Little change in polarization transfer coefficients ${D}_{i\mathcal{'}j}$ is found at 500 MeV. However, predictions of enhanced ${D}_{s\mathcal{'}s}$ and ${D}_{l\mathcal{'}l}$ are made at lower energies. Calculations are also presented for (p,n) quasifree charge exchange reactions. Here the analyzing power is almost unchanged but large changes in cross section and polarization transfer coefficients are possible. These changes depend on how pion contributions to the NN amplitudes are treated. Suggestions for future theoretical and experimental work are made.

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

title: Structure of accreted neutron star crust
abstract: Using molecular dynamics simulations, we determine the structure of neutron star crust made of rapid proton capture nucleosynthesis material. We find a regular body-centered cubic lattice, even with the large number of impurities that are present. Low-charge-Z impurities tend to occupy interstitial positions, while high-Z impurities tend to occupy substitutional lattice sites. We find strong attractive correlations between low-Z impurities that could significantly increase the rate of pycnonuclear (density driven) nuclear reactions. The thermal conductivity is significantly reduced by electron impurity scattering. Our results will be used in future work to study the effects of impurities on mechanical properties such as the shear modulus and breaking strain.

title: Semiclassical quark model of the nuclear matter response
abstract: The longitudinal response function R(q,w) of nuclear matter is calculated in a semiclassical quark model. The model has a many‐body string‐flip potential that confines quarks into hadrons and avoids color van der Waals forces. Molecular dynamics simulations are used to calculate R(q,w) in one space dimension for a variety of momentum transfers q and excitation energies w. The response function decreases with density (compared to a free hadron response) because of quark exchange between hadrons.

title: Equation of state of dense matter from a density dependent relativistic mean field model
abstract: We calculate the equation of state (EOS) of dense matter using a relativistic mean field (RMF) model with a density dependent coupling that is a slightly modified form of the original NL3 interaction. For nonuniform nuclear matter we approximate the unit lattice as a spherical Wigner-Seitz cell, wherein the meson mean fields and nucleon Dirac wave functions are solved fully self-consistently. We also calculate uniform nuclear matter for a wide range of temperatures, densities, and proton fractions, and match them to nonuniform matter as the density decreases. The calculations took over 6000 CPU days in Indiana University's supercomputer clusters. We tabulate the resulting EOS at over 107,000 grid points in the proton fraction range Y{sub P}=0 to 0.56. For the temperature range T=0.16 to 15.8 MeV, we cover the density range n{sub B}=10{sup -4} to 1.6 fm{sup -3}; and for the higher temperature range T=15.8 to 80 MeV, we cover the larger density range n{sub B}=10{sup -8} to 1.6 fm{sup -3}. In the future we plan to study low density, low temperature (T<15.8 MeV), nuclear matter using a Virial expansion, and we will match the low-density and high-density results to generate a complete EOS table for use in astrophysical simulationsmore » of supernova and neutron star mergers.« less

title: Breaking strain of neutron star crust and gravitational waves.
abstract: Mountains on rapidly rotating neutron stars efficiently radiate gravitational waves. The maximum possible size of these mountains depends on the breaking strain of the neutron star crust. With multimillion ion molecular dynamics simulations of Coulomb solids representing the crust, we show that the breaking strain of pure single crystals is very large and that impurities, defects, and grain boundaries only modestly reduce the breaking strain to around 0.1. Because of the collective behavior of the ions during failure found in our simulations, the neutron star crust is likely very strong and can support mountains large enough so that their gravitational wave radiation could limit the spin periods of some stars and might be detectable in large-scale interferometers. Furthermore, our microscopic modeling of neutron star crust material can help analyze mechanisms relevant in magnetar giant flares and microflares.

title: Quantum cosmology with a positive-definite action.
abstract: We argue that the indefiniteness of the Euclidean Einstein action is more serious in the cosmological context than in the asymptotically Euclidean context. To correct this, we consider a positive-definite action containing quadratic curvature terms. The physical states \ensuremath{\Psi} are now functions of both a three-metric ${q}_{\mathrm{ab}}$ and extrinsic curvature ${K}_{\mathrm{ab}}$, and satisfy a differential equation analogous to the Wheeler-DeWitt equation. This equation has the form of a Schr\"odinger equation with ${q}_{\mathrm{ab}}$ playing the role of ``time.'' By adopting Hartle and Hawking's boundary condition on the Euclidean function integral, we obtain a ``preferred'' solution to this equation. It is shown that in a simple minisuperspace model this wave function describes an inflationary universe.

title: Counting States of Near-Extremal Black Holes.
abstract: A six-dimensional black string is considered and its Bekenstein-Hawking entropy computed. It is shown that to leading order above extremality this entropy precisely counts the number of string states with the given energy and charges. This identification implies that Hawking decay of the near-extremal black string can be analyzed in string perturbation theory and is perturbatively unitary.

title: An equivalence between momentum and charge in string theory.
abstract: It is shown that for a translationally invariant solution to string theory, spacetime duality interchanges the momentum in the symmetry direction and the axion charge per unit length. As one application, we show explicitly that charged black strings are equivalent to boosted (uncharged) black strings. The extremal black strings (which correspond to the field outside of a fundamental macroscopic string) are equivalent to plane-fronted waves describing strings moving at the speed of light.

title: Charged black holes in string theory.
abstract: A family of solutions to low-energy string theory representing static, spherically symmetric charged black holes is described. They are labeled by their mass, charge, and asymptotic value of the scalar dilaton. The presence of the dilaton is found to have important consequences. In particular, the extremal charged black holes'' are found to be geodesically complete spacetimes with no event horizons and no singularities. Implications of these new solutions for black-hole thermodynamics and open questions in general relativity are also discussed.

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.