Yang-Mills cosmologies and collapsing gravitational sphalerons

Cosmological solutions with a homogeneous Yang-Mills field which oscillates and passes between topologically distinct vacua are discussed. These solutions are used to model the collapsing Bartnik-McKinnon gravitational sphaleron and the associated anomalous production of fermions. The Dirac equation is analyzed in these backgrounds. It is shown explicity that a fermion energy level crosses from the negative to positive energy spectrum as the gauge field evolves between the topologically distinct vacua. The cosmological solutions are also generalized to include an axion field.     

Progress in the quality assurance of environmental trace organic analysis

An overview is given on the stepwise learning programmes undertaken to identify the main sources of error associated with the determination of the mandatory organic contaminants in the marine monitoring programmes. Details are given on the preparation and use of LRMs and CRMs to maintain analytical control and quantify the laboratory errors in relation to the measurement of changes in the environment.     

The Hochschild class of the Chern character for semifinite spectral triples

We provide a proof of Connes’ formula for a representative of the Hochschild class of the Chern character for (p,∞)-summable spectral triples. Our proof is valid for all semifinite von Neumann algebras, and all integral p?1. We employ the minimum possible hypotheses on the spectral triples.