Let M be a complete Einstein manifold of negative curvature, and assume that (as in the AdS/CFT correspondence) it has a Penrose compactification with a conformal boundary M of positive scalar curvature. We show that under these conditions, M and in particular M must be connected. These results resolve some puzzles concerning the AdS/CFT correspondence.

We prove the following stronger version of the positivity of quasi-local energy (mass) stated by Liu and Yau: the quasi-local energy of each connected component of the boundary of a compact spacelike hypersurface which satisfies the local energy condition is strictly positive unless the spacetime is flat along the spacelike hypersurface and the boundary of the spacelike hypersurface is connected.

We compute the string production rate at the end of inflation, using the string spectrum obtained in [M. Li, W. Song, Y. Song, Quantizing strings in de Sitter space, JHEP 0704 (2007) 042, hep-th/0701258] in a near-de Sitter space. Our result shows that highly excited strings are hardly produced, thus the simple slow-roll inflation alone does not offer a cosmic string production mechanism.

It is shown analytically that the Dirac equation has no normalizable, time-periodic solutions in a ReissnerNordstrm black hole background; in particular, there are no static solutions of the Dirac equation in such a background metric. The physical interpretation is that Dirac particles can either disappear into the black hole or escape to infinity, but they cannot stay on a periodic orbit around the black hole.

We introduce a new model for elliptic fibrations endowed with a Mordell-Weil group of rank one. We call it a Q _7 (\mathscr {L},\mathscr {S}) model.