Thursday, June 16, 2011

"A Model for Cosmic Rays" by H. R. Gell-Mann

"In this paper, we present a criterion for geometric transitions. Next, we establish that the T-dual of new inflation depends on formulating an impossible model with solitons. Actually, a flavor Planck large mass extension of String Theory deformed by Wilson lines gives rise to a surprising framework for clarifying some conspicuous paradigms. A holographic superconductor is also analyzed. We therefore disagree with a result of Nelson that instanton liquids at the edge of our universe are transverse. When evaluating Randall-Euler RS1, we deduce that the strong CP problem is microscopic."

This paragraph contains vagueness and unidiomatic expressions which clearly identify it as a fake, but let's focus on the pseudo-content. The title tells us what it's about: cosmic rays.

What I find most intriguing are one of the claimed theoretical results (about T-duality applied to new inflation) and the concept attributed to "Nelson", of "instanton liquids at the edge of our universe" (which are "transverse"). Let's focus on the latter.

My preferred interpretation of transverseness would be in the sense of extra dimensions, forming a "bulk" outside an extended object like a braneworld. The boundary of a space at infinity can be rotating, I have learned today; so why couldn't an entity at such a boundary also be "transverse"? Perhaps the most sensible interpretation of all would be to see it as a statement about the asymptotic properties of a field: that they have a nonvanishing transverse component at infinity. So now we know what Nelson was saying: that certain instanton liquids remain transverse even at the "edge of our universe" (perhaps this refers to the cosmological horizon). But H.R. Gell-Mann disagrees!

Let's now tackle the concept of a "flavor Planck large mass extension of String Theory deformed by Wilson lines". The first few words are admittedly hard to parse. Is it a "flavor Planck" "large mass extension", or a "flavor" "Planck large mass extension"? I'm going to go for the latter, further sub-parsed as a "Planck-large mass extension", and I'll tentatively interpret it as being about adding a Romans mass to supergravity that is as large as the Planck mass. That it is "flavor" must have to do with the way that the Romans mass is introduced - e.g. in a way that involves flavor degrees of freedom, rather than color degrees of freedom. "Deformed by Wilson lines" is an ordinary wholesome concept, but not one we can do anything with (interpretively) unless we know more details. But at least we now know what sort of modification of string theory H.R. Gell-Mann was considering.

The most intriguing remaining sentence is the last: "When evaluating Randall-Euler RS1, we deduce that the strong CP problem is microscopic." RS1 is already Randall-Sundrum scenario 1, so we would appear to be dealing with a "Randall-Euler" variation on RS1. One would normally suppose that this was introduced in a paper by Randall and Euler, but Leonhard Euler died centuries before Lisa Randall was born. The next hermeneutic tactic, therefore, should be to suppose that "Euler" here is being used to denote a radical postmortem generalization of one of the dead mathematician's concepts. Euler himself furnishes an example, though it comes from outside physics: an Euler filter is a type of data filter, employed in computer animation, which utilizes Euler angles. Euler himself introduced the Euler angles, but computer graphics are definitely a post-Eulerian development. In any case, "Randall-Euler" must then denote a generalization (probably due to Lisa Randall) of the generalization of Euler's original concept, which is at work here. For a space to be Randall-Euler may mean that it has a particular geometric or topological property.

But what can it mean for the strong CP problem to "be microscopic"? The strong CP problem is the question of why QCD doesn't produce CP violation. Most likely, H.R. Gell-Mann is telling us that the reason for this is to be found in the microscopic (fundamental) variables realizing an effective field theory or other low-energy model.

Finally, let us return to the original intriguing conception, the "T-dual of new inflation". New inflation is rather old now - it dates from 1982 - but it is one of the standard inflationary scenarios. One paper succinctly characterizes it as a model "where the inflaton field rolls from a potential maximum at phi = 0 to a minimum at a symmetry breaking value phi = nu", and adds that the original new inflation model employed a Coleman-Weinberg potential. T-duality is a concept in string theory, and it is unsurprising that someone should consider whether string theoretic realizations of new inflation have T-duals, or that they would find that the existence of a T-dual description imposes stringent, perhaps "impossible", constraints.

All in all, then, although H.R. Gell-Mann's phrasing is not the best, we can see rather a lot of meaning in this abstract, and an expert in new inflation might be able to continue the game of interpretation considerably further and deeper than this.

No comments:

Post a Comment