We analyze the general class of supersymmetry preserving orbifolds of strong/weak Type IIA/heterotic dual pairs in six dimensions and below. A unified treatment is given by considering compactification to two spacetime dimensions and constructing orbifolds by subgroups of the Fischer-Greiss monster, utilizing the moonshine results of Conway and Norton. Duality requires nontrivial Ramond-Ramond fluxes on the Type IIA side which are localized at the fixed points. Further orbifolding by (-1)^{F_L} gives examples of new four dimensional N=2 Type IIA vacua which are not conformal field theory backgrounds.

A special class of braids, called woven, is introduced and it is shown that every conjugation class of the braid group contains woven braids. In consequence, links can be presented as plats or closures of woven braids. Restricting on knots, we get the 'woven version' of the well-known theorem of Markov, giving moves that are capable of producing all woven braids with equivalent closures. As corollary we obtain that a link in which each component is dyed with at least two colours can be projected onto a plane without crossing strands of the same colour. Finally a table of minimal woven braids for all nine crossing knots is appended.

As an illustration of the formalism of the master field we consider generalised $QCD_2$. We show how Wilson Loop averages for an arbitrary contour can be computed explicitly and with some ease. A generalised Hopf equation is shown to govern the behaviour of the eigenvalue density of Wilson loops. The collective field description of the theory is therefore deduced. Finally, the non-trivial master gauge field and field strengths are obtained. These results do not seem easily accessible with conventional means.

The loop variable approach used earlier to obtain free equations of motion for the massive modes of the open string, is generalized to include interaction terms. These terms, which are polynomial, involve only modes of strictly lower mass. Considerations based on operator product expansions suggest that these equations are particular truncations of the full string equations. The method involves broadening the loop to a band of finite thickness that describes all the different interacting strings. Interestingly, in terms of these variables, the theory appears non-interacting.

Many applications -- from planning and scheduling to problems in molecular biology -- rely heavily on a temporal reasoning component. In this paper, we discuss the design and empirical analysis of algorithms for a temporal reasoning system based on Allen's influential interval-based framework for representing temporal information. At the core of the system are algorithms for determining whether the temporal information is consistent, and, if so, finding one or more scenarios that are consistent with the temporal information. Two important algorithms for these tasks are a path consistency algorithm and a backtracking algorithm. For the path consistency algorithm, we develop techniques that can result in up to a ten-fold speedup over an already highly optimized implementation. For the backtracking algorithm, we develop variable and value ordering heuristics that are shown empirically to dramatically improve the performance of the algorithm. As well, we show that a previously suggested reformulation of the backtracking search problem can reduce the time and space requirements of the backtracking search. Taken together, the techniques we develop allow a temporal reasoning component to solve problems that are of practical size.

Let $A_tf(x)=\int f(x+ty)d\sigma(y)$ denote the spherical means in $\Bbb R^d$ ($d\sigma$ is surface measure on $S^{d-1}$, normalized to $1$). We prove sharp estimates for the maximal function $M_E f(x)=\sup_{t\in E}|A_tf(x)|$ where $E$ is a fixed set in $\Bbb R^+$ and $f$ is a {\it radial} function $\in L^p(\Bbb R^d)$. Let $p_d=d/(d-1)$ (the critical exponent of Stein's maximal function). For the cases (i) $p

Observations of Type Ia supernovae (SN~Ia) combined with modeling of dynamics, light curves and spectra continue to point to the difficult conclusion that SN~Ia result from degenerate ignition in a carbon/oxygen white dwarf of the Chandrasekhar mass. Such a model accounts well for the ``normal" SN~Ia and for the observed dispersion exemplified by the light curve amplitude-shape relation. The criterion that the white dwarfs involved in this process grow to nearly 1.4 Msun continues to provide a great challenge to understanding the binary stellar evolution involved. The so-called ``supersoft X-ray sources" may provide an important new population of SN~Ia progenitors. Other techniques are being developed that may constrain the binary evolution.

We analyze LEP and SLC data from the 1995 Summer Conferences as well as from low energy neutral current experiments for signals of new physics. The reasons for doing this are twofold, first to explain the deviations from the standard model observed in $R_b$ and $R_c$ and second to constrain non-standard contributions to couplings of the $Z^0$ boson to all fermions and to the oblique parameters. We do so by comparing the data with the Standard Model as well as with a number of test hypotheses concerning the nature of the new physics. These include non-standard $Zb\bar{b}$-, $Zc\bar{c}$- and $Zs\bar{s}$-couplings as well as the couplings of the $Z^0$ to fermions of the entire first, second and third generations and universal corrections to all up- and down-type quark couplings (as can arise \eg\ in $Z'$ mixing models). We find that non-standard $Zb\bar{b}$ couplings are both necessary and sufficient to explain the data and in particular the $R_b$ anomaly. It is not possible to explain $R_b$, $R_c$ and a value of the strong coupling constant consistent with low energy determinations invoking only non-standard $Zb\bar{b}$- and $Zc\bar{c}$-couplings. To do so one has to have also new physics contributions to the $Zs\bar{s}$ or universal corrections to all $Zq\bar{q}$ couplings.

It is demonstrated that the slope of the upper critical field $|dH_{c2}/dT|_{T_{c}}$ in superconductors with $d$-wave pairing drops rather fast with concentration of normal impurities, while in superconductors with anisotropic $s$-wave pairing $|dH_{c2}/dT|_{T_{c}}$ grows, and in the limit of strong disorder is described by the known dependences of the theory of ``dirty'' superconductors. This allows to use the measurements of $H_{c2}$ in disordered superconductors to discriminate between these different types of pairing in high-temperature and heavy-fermion superconductors.

A quantum error-correcting code is defined to be a unitary mapping (encoding) of k qubits (2-state quantum systems) into a subspace of the quantum state space of n qubits such that if any t of the qubits undergo arbitrary decoherence, not necessarily independently, the resulting n qubits can be used to faithfully reconstruct the original quantum state of the k encoded qubits. Quantum error-correcting codes are shown to exist with asymptotic rate k/n = 1 - 2H(2t/n) where H(p) is the binary entropy function -p log p - (1-p) log (1-p). Upper bounds on this asymptotic rate are given.