Publications by authors named "Constantin Bachas"

Universal properties of two-dimensional conformal interfaces are encoded by the flux of energy transmitted and reflected during a scattering process. We develop an innovative method that allows us to use results for the energy transmission in thin-brane holographic models to find the energy transmission for general smooth domain-wall solutions of three-dimensional gravity. Our method is based on treating the continuous geometry as a discrete set of branes.

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Scattering from conformal interfaces in two dimensions is universal in that the flux of reflected and transmitted energy does not depend on the details of the initial state. In this Letter, we present the first gravitational calculation of energy reflection and transmission coefficients for interfaces with thin-brane holographic duals. Our result for the reflection coefficient depends monotonically on the tension of the dual string anchored at the interface and obeys the lower bound recently derived from the averaged-null-energy condition in conformal field theory.

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In three spacetime dimensions the world volume of a magnetic source is a single point, an event. We make the event dynamical by regarding it as the imprint of a flux-carrying particle impinging from an extra dimension. This can be generalized to higher spacetime dimensions and to extended events.

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Wetting and minimal surfaces.

Phys Rev E Stat Nonlin Soft Matter Phys

March 2007

We study minimal surfaces which arise in wetting and capillarity phenomena. Using conformal coordinates, we reduce the problem to a set of coupled boundary equations for the contact line of the fluid surface and then derive simple diagrammatic rules to calculate the nonlinear corrections to the Joanny-de Gennes energy. We argue that perturbation theory is quasilocal--i.

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