Modern Physics Letters A

The Antarctic Muon and Neutrino Detector Array (AMANDA) is a high-energy neutrino telescope operating at the geographic South Pole. It is a lattice of photo-multiplier tubes buried deep in the polar ice. The primary goal of this detector is to discover astrophysical sources of high energy neutrinos. We describe the detector methods of operation and present results from the AMANDA-B10 prototype. We demonstrate the improved sensitivity of the current AMANDA-II detector. We conclude with an outlook to the envisioned sensitivity of the future IceCube detector.

The analysis of the time evolution of unstable states which are linear superposition of other, observable, states can, in principle, be carried out in two distinct, non-equivalent ways. One of the methods, usually employed for the neutral kaon system, combines the mixing and instability into one single step which then results in unconventional properties of the mass-eigenstates. An alternative method is to remain within the framework of a Lagrangian formalism and to perform the mixing prior to the instability analysis. Staying close to the system, we compare both methods pointing out some of their shortcomings and advantages.

In this paper we illustrate the existence of genuine bound states for a Dirac particle interacting with a scalar screened Coulomb potential in a 1 + 1 dimension. In contrast to the bare Coulomb potential, the screened Coulomb potential can bind both spin-zero and spin-1/2 particles in the scalar prescription.

We discuss the relationship between exact solvability of the Schrödinger equation with a position-dependent mass and the ordering ambiguity in the Hamiltonian operator within the framework of supersymmetric quantum mechanics. The one-dimensional Schrödinger equation, derived from the general form of the effective mass Hamiltonian, is solved exactly for a system with exponentially changing mass in the presence of a potential with similar behaviour, and the corresponding supersymmetric partner Hamiltonians are related to the effective-mass Hamiltonians proposed in the literature.

We consider M-theory on AdS₄ × V_5,2 where V_5,2 = SO(5)/SO(3) is a Stiefel manifold. We construct a Penrose limit of AdS₄ × V_5,2 that provides the pp-wave geometry. There exists a subsector of three-dimensional dual gauge theory, by taking both the conformal dimension and R charge large with the finiteness of their difference, which has enhanced maximal supersymmetry. We identify operators in the gauge theory with supergravity KK excitations in the pp-wave geometry and describe how the gauge theory operators made out of chiral field of conformal dimension 1/3 fall into supermultiplets.

From spinor and scalar (2 + 1)-dimensional QED effective actions at finite temperature and density in a constant magnetic field background, we calculate the corresponding virial coefficients for particles in the lowest Landau level. These coefficients depend on a parameter θ related to the time-component of the gauge field, which plays an essential role for large gauge invariance. The variation of the parameter θ might lead to an interpolation between fermionic and bosonic virial coefficients, although these coefficients are singular for θ = π/2.