We study N = 1 gauge theories obtained by adding finite mass terms to N = 4 Yang-Mills theory. The Maldacena dual is nonsingular: in each of the many vacua, there is an extended brane source, arising from Myers’ dielectric effect. The source consists of one or more (p,q) 5-branes. In particular, the confining vacuum contains an NS5-brane; the confining flux tube is a fundamental string bound to the 5-brane. The system admits a simple quantitative description as a perturbation of a state on the N = 4 Coulomb branch. Various nonperturbative phenomena, including flux tubes, baryon vertices, domain walls, condensates and instantons, have new, quantitatively precise, dual descriptions. We also briefly consider two QCD-like theories. Our method extends to the nonsupersymmetric case. As expected, the N = 4 matter cannot be decoupled within the supergravity regime.

orderedand form a lattice. By using timestamps and a simple clock update mechanism the structure of causality is represented in an isomorphic way. The new model of time has a close analogy to Minkowski's relativistic spacetime and leads among others to an interesting characterization of the global

Certain two dimensional topological field theories can be interpreted as string theory backgrounds in which the usual decoupling of ghosts and matter does not hold. Like ordinary string models, these can sometimes be given space-time interpretations. For instance, three-dimensional Chern

integral quantizations, coupling to matter, extensions to supergravity and higher dimensional theories, as well as applications to black holes, cosmology and Plank scale phenomenology. We describe the near term prospects for observational tests of quantum theories of gravity and the expectations that loop

We develop techniques to compute higher loop string amplitudes for twisted N = 2 theories with ĉ = 3 (i.e. the critical case). An important ingredient is the discovery of an anomaly at every genus in decoupling of BRST trivial states, captured to all orders by a master anomaly equation. In a particular realization of the N = 2 theories, the resulting string field theory is equivalent to a topological theory in six dimensions, the Kodaira– Spencer theory, which may be viewed as the closed string analog of the Chern–Simon theory. Using the mirror map this leads to computation of the ‘number ’ of holomorphic curves of higher genus curves in Calabi–Yau manifolds. It is shown that topological amplitudes can also be reinterpreted as computing corrections to superpotential terms appearing in the effective 4d theory resulting from compactification of standard 10d superstrings on the corresponding N = 2 theory. Relations with c = 1 strings are also pointed out.

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“Somebody says, ‘You know, you people always say that space is continuous. How do you know when you get to a small enough dimension that there really are enough points in between, that it isn’t just a lot of dots separated by little distances? ’ Or they say, ‘You know those quantum mechanical amplitudes you told me about, they’re so complicated and absurd, what makes you think those are right? Maybe they aren’t right. ’ Such remarks are obvious and are perfectly clear to anybody who is working on this problem. It does not do any good to point this out.” —Richard Feynman [1, p.161]

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The purpose of this chapter is to present a survey of recent publications concerning medical image registration techniques. These publications will be classified according to a model based on nine salient criteria, the main dichotomy of which is extrinsic versus intrinsic methods The statistics of the classification show definite trends in the evolving registration techniques, which will be discussed. At this moment, the bulk of interesting intrinsic methods is either based on segmented points or surfaces, or on techniques endeavoring to use the full information content of the images involved. Keywords: registration, matching Received May 25, 1997