At the Helmholtz center GSI, PHELIX (Petawatt High Energy Laser for heavy Ion eXperiments) has been commissioned for operation in stand-alone mode and, in combination with ions accelerated up to an energy of 13 MeV/u by the heavy ion accelerator UNILAC. The combination of PHELIX with the heavy-ion beams available at GSI enables a large variety of unique experiments. Novel research opportunities are spanning from the study of ionmatter interaction, through challenging new experiments in

The purpose of this paper is to construct and compare two natural definitions of the equivariant holomorphic torsion. The comparison formula is shown to be compatible with the embedding formulas obtained by the first author for analytic torsion forms and equivariant analytic torsion.

We establish extremality of Riemannian metrics g with non-negative curvature operator on symmetric spaces M=G/K of compact type with rk(G)-rk(K)\le 1. Let g' be another metric with scalar curvature k', such that g'\ge g on 2-vectors. We show that k'\ge k everywhere on M implies k'=k. Under an additional condition on the Ricci curvature of g, k'\ge k even implies g'=g. We also study area-non-increasing spin maps onto such Riemannian manifolds.Comment: 13 pages, LaTeX, uses amsar

The purpose of this paper is to give an explicit local formula for the difference of two natural versions of equivariant analytic torsion in de Rham theory. This difference is the sum of the integral of a Chern-Simons current and of a new invariant, the V -invariant of an odd dimensional manifold equipped with an action of a compact Lie group. The V -invariant localizes on the critical manifolds of invariant Morse-Bott functions.The results in this paper are shown to be compatible with results of Bunke, and also our with previous results on analytic torsion forms.

Abstract. We present a formula for the full Cheeger-Chern-Simons class of the tautological flat complex vector bundle of rank 2 over BSL(2, C δ ). Our formula improves the formula in [DZ], where the class is only computed modulo 2-torsion.