arXiv subjects
Publications and source records attributed to Rene Lafrance.
Using a new regulator, we examine 't Hooft's approach for evaluating black hole entropy through a statistical-mechanical counting of states for a scalar field propagating outside the event horizon. We find that this calculation yields precisely the one-loop renormalization of the standard Bekenstein-Hawking formula, $S={\Cal A}/(4G)$. Thus our result provides evidence confirming a suggestion by Susskind and Uglum regarding black hole entropy.
Limits for the applicability of the equivalence principle are considered in the context of low-energy effective field theories. In particular, we find a class of higher-derivative interactions for the gravitational and electromagnetic fields which produce dispersive photon propagation. The latter is illustrated by calculating the energy-dependent contribution to the deflection of light rays.
Several new results on the multicritical behavior of rectangular matrix models are presented. We calculate the free energy in the saddle point approximation, and show that at the triple-scaling point, the result is the same as that derived from the recursion formulae. In the triple-scaling limit, we obtain the string equation and a flow equation for arbitrary multicritical points. Parametric solutions are also examined for the limit of almost-square matrix models. This limit is shown to provide an explicit matrix model realization of the scaling equations proposed to describe open-closed string theory.
We report results of two investigations of the double-scaling equations for the unitary matrix models. First, the fixed area partition functions have all positive coefficients only for the first four critical points. This implies that the critical points at $k\ge5$ describe non-unitary continuum theories. Secondly, we examine a conjectured connection to branched polymers, but find that the scaling solutions of the unitary models do not agree with those of a particular model describing branched polymers.