We show that the recently proposed weak gravity conjecture\cite{AMNV0601} can be extended to a class of scalar field theories. Taking gravity into account, we find an upper bound on the gravity interaction strength, expressed in terms of scalar coupling parameters. This conjecture is supported by some two-dimensional models and noncommutative field theories.

In this paper, we present a practical and provably secure two-pass authenticated key exchange protocol over ideal lattices, which is conceptually simple and has similarities to the Diffie-Hellman based protocols such as HMQV (CRYPTO 2005) and OAKE (CCS 2013). Our method does not involve other cryptographic primitives—in particular, it does not use signatures—which simplifies the protocol and enables us to base the security directly on the hardness of the ring learning with errors problem. The security is proven in the Bellare-Rogaway model with weak perfect forward secrecy in the random oracle model. We also give a one-pass variant of our two-pass protocol, which might be appealing in specific applications. Several concrete choices of parameters are provided, and a proof-of-concept implementation shows that our protocols are indeed practical.

This note is based on a series of four lectures the author gave at University of Montpellier, September 28-30, 2015. He started with the notion of mass in general relativity, gave a brief review of some known constructions of quasi-local mass, and then discussed the new quasi-local energy and quasi-local mass which Shing-Tung Yau and the author introduced in 2009. At the end, the proof of the positivity of quasi-local energy was sketched and a stability theorem of critical points of quasi-local energy by Po-Ning Chen, Shing-Tung Yau, and the author was discussed

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This paper is concerned with an interior penalty discontinuous Galerkin (IPDG) method based on a flexible type of non-polynomial local approximation space for the Helmholtz equation with varying wavenumber. The local approximation space consists of multiple polynomial-modulated phase functions which can be chosen according to the phase information of the solution. We obtain some {approximation} properties for this space and \textit{a prior} $L^2$ error estimates for the \textit{h}-convergence of the IPDG method using duality argument. We also provide ample numerical examples to show that, building phase information into the local spaces often gives more accurate results comparing to using the standard polynomial spaces.