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When stars form within small groups (with N Ã % 100 500 members), their circumstellar disks are exposed to relatively little extreme-ultraviolet (EUV; h > 13:6 eV) radiation but a great deal of far-ultraviolet (FUV; 6 eV < h < 13:6 eV) radiation ($10 3 times the local interstellar FUV field) from the most massive stars in the group. This paper calculates the mass-loss rates and evaporation timescales for circumstellar disks exposed to external FUV radiation. Previous work treated large disks and/or intense radiation fields in which the disk radius r d exceeds the critical radius r g where the sound speed in the FUV heated surface layer exceeds the escape speed; it has often been assumed that photoevaporation occurs for r d > r g and is negligible for r d < r g . Since r g k 100 AU for FUV heating, this would imply little mass loss from the planet-forming regions of a disk. In this paper we focus on systems in which photoevaporation is suppressed because r d < r g and show that significant mass loss still takes place as long as r d =r g k 0:1 0:2. Some of the gas extends beyond the disk edge (or above the disk surface) to larger distances where the temperature is higher, the escape speed is lower, and an outflow develops. The resulting evaporation rate is a sensitive function of the central stellar mass and disk radius, which determine the escape speed, and the external FUV flux, which determines the temperature structure of the surface layers and outflowing gas. Disks around red dwarfs, low-mass stars with M Ã P 0:5 M , are evaporated and shrink to disk radii r d P15 AU on short timescales t P10 Myr when exposed to moderate FUV fields with G 0 ¼ 3000 (where G 0 ¼ 1:7 for the local interstellar FUV field). The disks around solar-type stars are more durable. For intense FUV radiation fields with G 0 ¼ 30; 000, however, even these disks shrink to r d P 15 AU on timescales t $ 10 Myr. Such fields exist within about 0.7 pc of the center of a cluster with N Ã % 4000 stars. If our solar system formed in the presence of such strong FUV radiation fields, this mechanism could explain why Neptune and Uranus in our solar system are gas-poor, whereas Jupiter and Saturn are relatively gas-rich. This mechanism for photoevaporation can also limit the production of Kuiper Belt objects and can suppress giant planet formation in sufficiently large clusters, such as the Hyades, especially for disks associated with low-mass stars.

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A pseudo-Nambu-Goldstone boson, with a potential of the form V (φ) = Λ 4 [1 ± cos(φ/f )], can naturally give rise to an epoch of inflation in the early universe, if f ∼ M P l and Λ ∼ M GU T . Such mass scales arise in particle physics models with a gauge group that becomes strongly interacting at the GUT scale. We explore the particle physics basis for these models, focusing on technicolor and superstring theories, and work out a specific example based on the multiple gaugino condensation scenario in string/supergravity theory. We study the cosmological evolution of and constraints upon these models numerically and analytically. To obtain a sufficiently high post-inflation reheat temperature for baryosynthesis to occur we require f ∼ > 0.3M pl . The primordial density fluctuation spectrum generated by quantum fluctuations in φ is a non-scale-invariant power law, P (k) ∝ k n s , with n s ≃ 1 − (M 2 P l /8πf 2 ), leading to more power on large length scales than the n s = 1 Harrison-Zeldovich spectrum. We pay special attention to the prospects of using the enhanced power to explain the otherwise puzzling large-scale clustering of galaxies and clusters and their flows. We find that the standard cold dark matter model with 0 ∼ < n s ∼ < 0.6 could in principle explain this data. However, the microwave background anisotropies recently detected by COBE imply such low primordial amplitudes (that is, bias factors b 8 ∼ > 2) for these CDM models that galaxy formation would occur too late to be viable and the large-scale galaxy flows would be too small; when combined with COBE, these each lead to the constraint n s ∼ > 0.6, hence f > 0.3M P l , comparable to the bound from baryogenesis. For other inflation models which give rise to initial fluctuation spectra that are power laws through the 3 decades in wavelength