We describe a new approach to the well known canonical decompositions of 3-manifolds.

The vacuum is proposed to be a dielectric medium constituted of neutral but polarizable vacuuons based on overall experimental observations in separate publications. In the present paper I formally develop the dielectric theory for this dielectric vacuum. * This is an abbreviated but self-contained introduction to the dielectric theory I formulated as part of a unification scheme I developed si...

We compute the 1-loop (NNLO) corrections to hard spectator-scattering in tree-dominated hadronic B decays. Depending on the values of hadronic input parameters the corrections are shown to have a significant impact on the B → ππ branching fractions.