A familiar anomaly affects SU(2) gauge theory in four dimensions: a theory with an odd number of fermion multiplets in the spin 1/2 representation of the gauge group, and more generally in representations of spin 2r+1/2, is inconsistent. We describe here a more subtle anomaly that can affect SU(2) gauge theory in four dimensions under the condition that fermions transform with half-integer spin under SU(2) and bosons with integer spin. Such a theory, formulated in a way that requires no choice of spin structure, and with an odd number of fermion multiplets in representations of spin 4r+3/2, is inconsistent. The theory is consistent if one picks a spin or spin_c structure. Under Higgsing to U(1), the new SU(2) anomaly reduces to a known anomaly of "all-fermion electrodynamics." Like that theory, an SU(2) theory with an odd number of fermion multiplets in representations of spin 4r+3/2 can provide a boundary state for a five-dimensional gapped theory whose partition function on a closed five-manifold Y is (−1)^{∫_Y w2w3}. All statements have analogs with SU(2) replaced by Sp(2N). There is also an analog in five dimensions.

No abstract uploaded!

Positivity-preserving discontinuous Galerkin (DG) methods for solving hyperbolic conservation laws have been extensively studied in the last several years. But nearly all the developed schemes are coupled with explicit time discretizations. Explicit discretizations suffer from the constraint for the Courant-Friedrichs-Levis (CFL) number. This makes explicit methods impractical for problems involving unstructured and extremely varying meshes or long-time simulations. Instead, implicit DG schemes are often popular in practice, especially in the computational fluid dynamics (CFD) community. In this paper we develop a high-order positivity-preserving DG method with the backward Euler time discretization for conservation laws. We focus on one spatial dimension, however the result easily generalizes to multidimensional tensor product meshes and polynomial spaces. This work is based on a generalization of the positivity-preserving limiters in (X. Zhang and C.-W. Shu, Journal of Computational Physics, 229 (2010), pp.~3091--3120) and (X. Zhang and C.-W. Shu, Journal of Computational Physics, 229 (2010), pp.~8918--8934) to implicit time discretizations. Both the analysis and numerical experiments indicate that a lower bound for the CFL number is required to obtain the positivity-preserving property. The proposed scheme not only preserves the positivity of the numerical approximation without compromising the designed high-order accuracy, but also helps accelerate the convergence towards the steady-state solution and add robustness to the nonlinear solver. Numerical experiments are provided to support these conclusions.

In these notes, we provide an introduction to the hemisphere partition function of 2d (2, 2) supersymmetric gauge theories, and discuss its relation to the “D-brane central charge” which were studied in superstring theory, in 2d supersymmetric quantum field theory, and in topological string theory. We also discuss relation to “macroscopic loop” in matrix models. They are mostly reviews of the work by the authors, but contains some new results such as the partition function for a rotated supersymmetry as well as the differential equations.

Often times, the ability to distinguish between random data and a public key can leads to an attack against the cryptosystem itself. In this paper, we will show experimentally a very efficient distinguisher based on the distribution of ranks of the symmetric matrices associated with the central map in the multivariate cryptosystem HFE when the degree D of the central map is very small.