New Publications

Two new books have been published by members of the School:

• "Statistical Methods for Demography and Life Insurance" by Estate Khmaladze
  Moscow: URSS, 2009.

• "The Kerr spacetime: Rotating black holes in general relativity."
  Edited by: David Wiltshire, Matt Visser, Susan Scott. Chapters by: Matt Visser, Roy Kerr, Roger Penrose, Brandon Carter, David Robinson, Ben Lewis and Susan Scott, Remo Ruffini, Fulvio Melia, Andrew Fabian and Giovanni Miniutti, Maurice van Putten, Steve Carlip, Gary Horowitz. ISBN: 9780521885126 [22 January 2009] Cambridge University Press.
  see also: http://homepages.ecs.vuw.ac.nz/~visser/book4.shtml

• ... and an honourable mention in Nature Physics Research Highlights (April 2009) for a paper in Phys Rev D. by Gabriel Abreu and Matt Visser
  "It's feasible, in quantum physics, to have a large negative energy density at a point - and with this comes all sorts of weird possibilities such as traversable wormholes and time machines. Fortunately, to stop things getting out of hand, there are constraints on average or total energy over a volume or line, such as that expressed in the 'quantum interest conjecture': overall, the energy density must be positive; negative energy density somewhere must be more than compensated for by positive energy density elsewhere. For the example of energy pulses, this means that the amount of negative energy in a pulse is constrained to be more than balanced by a larger positive-energy pulse; the time interval between such pulses is also restricted, according to the conjecture. The net energy of the two pulses, necessarily positive, is the 'quantum interest'. The quantum interest conjecture has already been proved in (1 + 1) Minkowski space, but now Gabriel Abreu and Matt Visser have taken it into more dimensions. By proving a variant of Simon's theorem for the biharmonic Schördinger equation, they have reformulated the conjecture for (3 + 1) Minkowski space. In fact, the result can be generalized to any Minkowski space that has an even number of dimensions."