In a recent important breakthrough D. Christodoulou has solved a long standing problem of General Relativity of evolutionary formation of trapped surfaces in the Einstein-vacuum space-times. He has identified an open set of regular initial conditions on an outgoing null hypersurface (both finite and at past null infinity) leading to a formation a trapped surface in the corresponding vacuum space-time to the future of the initial outgoing hypersurface and another incoming null hypersurface with the prescribed Minkowskian data. In this paper we give a simpler proof for a finite problem by enlarging the admissible set of initial conditions and, consistent with this, relaxing the corresponding propagation estimates just enough that a trapped surface still forms. We also reduce the number of derivatives needed in the argument from two derivatives of the curvature to just one. More importantly, the proof, which can be easily localized with respect to angular sectors, has the potential for further developments.

We establish the global existence and uniqueness of classical solutions to the Cauchy problem for the isentropic compressible Navier-Stokes equations in three spatial dimensions with smooth initial data that are of small energy but possibly large oscillations with constant state as far field, which could be either vacuum or nonvacuum. The initial density is allowed to vanish, and the spatial measure of the set of vacuum can be arbitrarily large; in particular, the initial density can even have compact support. These results generalize previous results on classical solutions for initial densities being strictly away from vacuum and are the first for global classical solutions that may have large oscillations and can contain vacuum states. © 2012 Wiley Periodicals, Inc

This paper presents a versatile and robust SPH simulation approach for multiple-fluid flows. The spatial distribution of different phases or components is modeled using the volume fraction representation, the dynamics of multiple-fluid flows is captured by using an improved mixture model, and a stable and accurate SPH formulation is rigorously derived to resolve the complex transport and transformation processes encountered in multiple-fluid flows. The new approach can capture a wide range of realworld multiple-fluid phenomena, including mixing/unmixing of miscible and immiscible fluids, diffusion effect and chemical reaction etc. Moreover, the new multiple-fluid SPH scheme can be readily integrated into existing state-of-the-art SPH simulators, and the multiple-fluid simulation is easy to set up. Various examples are presented to demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach.

We find the shock wave solutions in a class of cosmological backgrounds with a null singularity, each of these backgrounds admits a matrix description. A shock wave solution breaks all supersymmetry meanwhile indicates that the interaction between two static D0-branes cancel, thus provides basic evidence for the matrix description. The probe action of a D0-brane in the background of another suggests that the usual perturbative expansion of matrix model breaks down.

The superradiant scattering of a scalar field with frequency and angular momentum (ω, m) by a near-extreme Kerr black hole with mass and spin (M, J) was derived in the seventies by Starobinsky, Churilov, Press and Teukolsky. In this paper we show that for frequencies scaled to the superradiant bound the full functional dependence on (ω, m, M, J) of the scattering amplitudes is precisely reproduced by a dual two-dimensional conformal field theory in which the black hole corresponds to a specific thermal state and the scalar field to a specific operator. This striking agreement corroborates a conjectured Kerr/CFT correspondence.