In our five-dimensional cosmological model, we investigate the role of a Lorentz
violating vector “æther” field on the moduli stabilization mechanism. We consider the case
of a space-like æther field on a compact circle with Maxwell-type kinetic term. The Casimir
energy of certain combinations of massless and massive bulk fields generates a stabilizing
potential for the radius of the compact direction while driving the accelerated expansion
in the non-compact directions.

In this paper we show that Liouville gravity on the strip with Zamolodchikov-
Zamolodchikov (ZZ) boundary conditions has a semi-classical interpretation in terms of
fragmented AdS2 spacetime geometries. Further, we study the three-point functions of the
ZZ boundary primaries, and show that they are dominated by multi-AdS2 instantons in
the classical limit.

We found that a ZnO film of 2µm thickness which was laser-deposited at room temperature onto a plain soda lime glass substrate, exhibits notable antibacterial activity against a biofilm of Staphylococcus epidermidis when back-illuminated by a UVA light source with a peak emission wavelength of about 365 nm. X-ray diffraction (XRD), scanning electron microscopy (SEM), atomic force microscopy (AFM), UV-visible absorption spectroscopy, Raman spectroscopy and x-ray photoemission spectroscopy (XPS) were used to characterize the ZnO films before and after the interactions with the biofilm and the ultraviolet light, respectively.

We study the tensions of domain walls in the deconfined phase of N = 4
SUSY Yang-Mills theory on R3×S1, at weak and strong coupling. We calculate the k-wall
tension at one-loop order and find that it is proportional to k(N ? k) (Casimir scaling).

We have proposed a new least-squares method for signal estimation with a complicated and
therefore more realistic mathematical model of the multichannel seismic record containing
random noise and an arbitrary number of coherent noise wavetrains. The signal and all the
coherent noise wavetrains are supposed to bear individual trace-independent waveforms being
mutually uncorrelated in time stationary stochastic processes. The amplitudes and arrival times
of these record components vary from trace to trace in an arbitrary manner.