To a good approximation, on large scales, the evolved two-point correlation function of biased tracers is related to the initial one by a convolution with a smearing kernel. For Gaussian initial conditions, the smearing kernel is Gaussian, so if the initial correlation function is parametrized using simple polynomials, then the evolved correlation function is a sum of generalized Laguerre functions of half-integer order. This motivates an analytic “Laguerre reconstruction” algorithm which previous work has shown is fast and accurate. This reconstruction requires as input the width of the smearing kernel. We show that the method can be extended to estimate the width of the smearing kernel from the same dataset. This estimate, and associated uncertainties, can then be used to marginalize over the distribution of reconstructed shapes and hence provide error estimates on the value of the distance scale. This procedure is not tied to a particular cosmological model. We also show that if, instead, we parametrize the evolved correlation function using simple polynomials, then the initial one is a sum of Hermite polynomials, again enabling fast and accurate deconvolution. If one is willing to use constraints on the smearing scale from other datasets, then marginalizing over its value is simpler for this latter, “Hermite” reconstruction, potentially providing further speed-ups in cosmological analyses.

The Laser Interferometer Space Antenna (LISA) aims to observe gravitational waves in the mHz regime over its 10-year mission time. LISA will operate laser interferometers between three spacecrafts. Each spacecraft will utilize independent clocks which determine the sampling times of onboard phasemeters to extract the interferometric phases and, ultimately, gravitational wave signals. To suppress limiting laser frequency noise, signals sampled by each phasemeter need to be combined in postprocessing to synthesize virtual equal-arm interferometers. The synthesis in turn requires a synchronization of the independent clocks. This article reports on the experimental verification of a clock synchronization scheme down to LISA performance levels using a hexagonal optical bench. The development of the scheme includes data processing that is expected to be applicable to the real LISA data with minor modifications. Additionally, some noise coupling mechanisms are discussed.

A wide field-of-view Cherenkov telescope has been working in the surroundings of the Yakutsk array experiment since 2012. Its main function is to measure the waveform of the optical Cherenkov radiation signal induced by extensive air showers of cosmic rays. Analysis of the dataset collected by the telescope in the vicinity of ${10}^{17}\mathrm{eV}$ is intended for the reconstruction of the parameters of the development of the showers in addition to the main shower characteristics measured by the rest of the array detectors. In this paper, the observed duration of the Cherenkov radiation signal as a function of the shower core distance is used to estimate the depth of the shower maximum in a different way based on the results of model simulations. The results are in general agreement with those of other works.

In this article we explore the phase diagram associated to the symmetry breaking of a scalar self-interacting theory, induced by temperature and the presence of an external electric field. For such purpose, first we obtain the boson propagator, in the presence of a constant external electric field, both in the weak and strong field strength limits. Novel expansions are derived for the effective potential, valid for the whole range of temperature. We found inverse electric catalysis for the weak field region, i.e., a situation where the critical temperature diminishes as function of the strength of the electric field whereas for a strong field electric catalysis emerges. These behaviors, in the weak and strong intensity sectors, are valid for all possible values of temperature.

We calculate the threshold $T$ matrices of the light pseudoscalar meson and heavy meson scattering to fourth order in heavy meson chiral perturbation theory. We determine the low-energy constants by fitting to the lattice QCD data points through both the perturbative and iterated methods and obtain the physical scattering lengths in both formalisms. The values of the scattering lengths tend to be convergent at fourth order for most of the channels in the perturbative method. The value of the scattering length for the channel $DK(I=0)$, which involves the bound state $D_{s0}^{*}(2317)$, is obtained correctly in the iterated method. Based on the heavy diquark-antiquark symmetry, we also estimate the meson and doubly charmed (bottom) baryon scattering lengths, and find that the bound states can be generated with high probability in the channels $\overline{K}{\mathrm{\Xi }}_{cc}(I=0)$ and $\overline{K}{\mathrm{\Xi }}_{bb}(I=0)$. We strongly urge the LHCb Collaboration to look for the very narrow $\overline{K}{\mathrm{\Xi }}_{cc}$ state with $I{J}^P=0{\frac{1}{2}}^{-}$ through either the electromagnetic decay or the iso-spin violating strong decay ${\mathrm{\Omega }}_{cc}\pi$.

In twin Higgs models that contain the minimal particle content required to address the little hierarchy problem (i.e., fraternal models), the twin tau has been identified as a promising candidate for dark matter. In this class of scenarios, however, the elastic scattering cross section of the twin tau with nuclei exceeds the bounds from XENON1T and other recent direct detection experiments. In this paper, we propose a modification to the fraternal twin Higgs scenario that we call ${\mathbb{Z}}_2\mathrm{FTH}$, incorporating visible and twin hypercharged scalars (with $Y=2$) which break twin electromagnetism. This leads to new mass terms for the twin tau that are unrelated to its Yukawa coupling, as well as additional annihilation channels via the massive twin photon. We show that these features make it possible for the right-handed twin tau to freeze out with an acceptable thermal relic abundance while scattering with nuclei at a rate that is well below existing constraints. Nonetheless, large portions of the currently viable parameter space in this model are within the reach of planned direct detection experiments. The prospects for indirect detection using gamma rays and cosmic-ray antiprotons are also promising in this model. Furthermore, if the twin neutrino is light, the predicted deviation of $\mathrm{\Delta }{N}_{\mathrm{eff}}\approx 0.1$ would be within reach of Stage 4 cosmic microwave background experiments. Finally, the high luminosity LHC should be able to probe the entire parameter space of the ${\mathbb{Z}}_2\mathrm{FTH}$ model through charged scalar searches. We also discuss how searches for long-lived particles are starting to constrain fraternal twin Higgs models.

Toplike vector quarks arising from underlying strong sectors are expected to have large decay widths pushing them beyond the narrow width approximation. In this paper we consider a broad colored vector quark that strongly couples to an exotic pseudoscalar. We use the full 1PI resummed propagator for the exotic quark to recast the present LHC constraints ruling out masses below $\sim 1.2(1.1)\mathrm{TeV}$ for width to mass ratio of 0.1(0.6). We utilize machine learning techniques that are demonstratively more efficient than traditional cut based searches to present the reach of HL-LHC on the parameter space of this broad resonance. We find that at $3{\mathrm{ab}}^{-1}$ the HL-LHC has a discovery potential up to 1.6 TeV dominated by the pair production channel. We study the feasibility of using machine learning techniques to analyze the broad resonance peaks expected from these exotic quarks at collider experiments like the LHC.

The collision of two real photons can result in the emission of axions. We investigate the performance of a modified light-shining-through-wall (LSW) axion search aiming to overcome the large signal suppression for axion masses $m_a\ge 1\mathrm{eV}$. We propose to utilize a third beam to stimulate the reconversion of axions into a measurable signal. We thereby find that with currently available high-power laser facilities we expect bounds at axion masses between 0.5–6 eV reaching $g_{a\gamma \gamma }\ge {10}^{-7}{\mathrm{GeV}}^{-1}$. Combining the use of optical lasers with currently operating x-ray free electron lasers, we extend the mass range to 10–100 eV.

According to recent work of Greensite and Matsuyama, the Higgs phase of a gauge-Higgs theory is distinguished from the confinement and massless phases by the spontaneous breaking of a global center subgroup of the gauge group, and by confinement type. This is contrary to the notion that there is no essential distinction between the Higgs and confinement phases when the Higgs field is in the fundamental representation of the gauge group. Although this new symmetry-breaking order parameter has been investigated in $D=4$ dimensions, there is so far no check in a non-Abelian gauge theory containing a massless as well as confinement/Higgs phases, where the prediction is that the symmetry-breaking order parameter will show transition lines separating the massless-to-Higgs and confinement-to-Higgs phases, but not the massless-to-confinement phase. In this work we map out the phase structure of the $D=5$ dimensional model, according to both the symmetry-breaking parameter and thermodynamic observables, and check the assertion regarding the massless-to-confinement phase.

We propose a quantum algorithm to compute low-energy expectation values of a quantum Hamiltonian by sampling a partition function associated with the average energy of that Hamiltonian. For any given quantum circuit-Hamiltonian pair, there is an associated average energy. The sampling is done through an accept/reject Metropolis-style algorithm on the quantum gates of the circuit itself. Observables calculated under the canonical ensemble from these samples of circuits are extrapolated from higher energies to the ground state.

We point out that chiral condensates at nonzero temperature and magnetic fields are in strict connection to the space-time integral of corresponding two-point neutral meson correlation functions in the pseudoscalar channel via the Ward-Takahashi identity. Screening masses of neutral pseudoscalar mesons, which are defined as the exponential decay of the corresponding spatial correlation functions in the long distance, thus are intrinsically connected to (inverse) magnetic catalysis of chiral condensates. To study this we performed lattice simulations of ($2+1$)-flavor QCD on ${32}^3\times N_t$ lattices with pion mass $M_{\pi }\simeq 220\mathrm{MeV}$ in a fixed scale approach having temperature $T\in [17,281]\mathrm{MeV}$ and magnetic field strength $eB\in [0,2.5]{\mathrm{GeV}}^2$. We find that screening lengths, i.e., inverses of screening masses of ${\pi }^0$, $K^0$ and ${\eta }_{s\overline{s}}^0$, turn out to have the similar complex $eB$ and $T$ dependences of the corresponding chiral condensates. Although the transition temperature is found to always decrease as $eB$ grows, we show that the suppression due to magnetic fields becomes less significant for hadron screening length and chiral condensates with heavier quarks involved, and ceases to occur for ${\eta }_{s\overline{s}}^0$ and strange quark chiral condensate. The complex $eB$ and $T$ dependences of both screening masses and chiral condensates, reflecting the crossover nature of the QCD transition, are attributed to the competition between sea and valence quark effects. These findings could be useful to guide low-energy models and effective theories of QCD.

The Pomeron Regge trajectory underlies the dynamics dependence of hadronic total cross sections and diffractive reactions at high energies. The physics of the Pomeron is closely related to the gluon distribution function and the gluon gravitational form factor of the target hadron. In this article we examine the scale dependence of the nonperturbative gluon distribution in the nucleon and the pion, which was derived in a previous article [G. F. de Téramond, H. G. Dosch, T. Liu, R. S. Sufian, S. J. Brodsky, and A. Deur, Gluon matter distribution in the proton and pion from extended holographic light-front QCD, Phys. Rev. D 104, 114005 (2021)] in the framework of holographic light-front QCD and the Veneziano model. We argue that the QCD evolution of the gluon distribution function $g(x,\mu )$ to large ${\mu }^2$ leads to a single scale-dependent Pomeron. The resulting Pomeron trajectory ${\alpha }_P(t,\mu )$ not only depends on the momentum transfer squared $t$, but also on the physical scale $\mu$ of the amplitude, such as the virtuality $Q^2$ of the interacting photon in inclusive diffractive electroproduction, thus unifying the soft and the perturbative Pomeron. This can explain not only the $Q^2$ evolution of the proton structure function $F_2(x,Q^2)$ at small $x$, but also the observed energy and $Q^2$ dependence of high energy diffractive processes involving virtual photons up to LHC energies.

If known, the spectrum of heavy-hadron molecules will be a key tool to disentangle the nature of the exotic states that are being discovered in experiments. Here we argue that the general features of the molecular spectrum can be deduced from the idea that the short-range interaction between the heavy hadrons is effectively described by scalar- and vector-meson exchange, i.e., the $\sigma$, $\rho$, and $\omega$ mesons. By means of a contact-range theory, where the couplings are saturated by the aforementioned light mesons, we are indeed able to postdict the $X(3872)$ (as a $D^{*}\overline{D}$ molecule) from the three $P_c(4312)$, $P_c(4440)$, and $P_c(4457)$ pentaquarks (as $\overline{D}{\mathrm{\Sigma }}_c$ and ${\overline{D}}^{*}{\mathrm{\Sigma }}_c$ molecules). We predict a $J^{PC}=1^{--}D{\overline{D}}_1$ molecule at $4240–4260\mathrm{MeV}$, which might support the hypothesis that the $Y(4260)$ is at least partly molecular. The extension of these ideas to the light baryons requires minor modifications, after which we recover approximate SU(4)-Wigner symmetry in the two-nucleon system and approximately reproduce the masses of the deuteron and the virtual state.

A theoretical description of elastic polarized muon-electron scattering is presented. Complete one-loop electroweak radiative corrections are calculated with taking into account the exact dependence on the muon mass. The effects due to some higher-order corrections and the electroweak scheme dependence are analyzed. The case of longitudinally polarized fermions in the initial state is investigated. Analytical results are derived with the help of the sanc system. Numerical results are presented for unpolarized and polarized cross sections. Calculations are realized in the Monte Carlo integrator mcsancee and generator renesance, which allow the implementation of any experimental cuts used in the analysis of elastic $\mu -e$ scattering data.

A search for new heavy resonances decaying to pairs of bosons ($WW$, $WZ$, or $WH$) is presented. The analysis uses data from proton-proton collisions collected with the CMS detector at a center-of-mass energy of 13 TeV, corresponding to an integrated luminosity of $137{\mathrm{fb}}^{-1}$. One of the bosons is required to be a W boson decaying to an electron or muon and a neutrino, while the other boson is required to be reconstructed as a single jet with mass and substructure compatible with a quark pair from a $W$, $Z$, or Higgs boson decay. The search is performed in the resonance mass range between 1.0 and 4.5 TeV and includes a specific search for resonances produced via vector boson fusion. The signal is extracted using a two-dimensional maximum likelihood fit to the jet mass and the diboson invariant mass distributions. No significant excess is observed above the estimated background. Model-independent upper limits on the production cross sections of spin-0, spin-1, and spin-2 heavy resonances are derived as functions of the resonance mass and are interpreted in the context of bulk radion, heavy vector triplet, and bulk graviton models. The reported bounds are the most stringent to date.

Using $6.32{\mathrm{fb}}^{-1}$ of $e^{+}{e}^{-}$ collision data recorded by the BESIII detector at center-of-mass energies between 4.178 to 4.226 GeV, we present the first measurement of the decay $D_s^{+}\to f_0(980)e^{+}{\nu }_e,f_0(980)\to {\pi }^0{\pi }^0$. The product branching fraction of $D_s^{+}\to f_0(980)e^{+}{\nu }_e,f_0(980)\to {\pi }^0{\pi }^0$ is measured to be $(7.9\pm 1.4_{\mathrm{stat}}\pm 0.4_{\mathrm{syst}})\times {10}^{-4}$, with a statistical significance of $7.8\sigma$. Furthermore, the upper limits on the product branching fractions of $D_s^{+}\to f_0(500)e^{+}{\nu }_e$ with $f_0(500)\to {\pi }^0{\pi }^0$ and the branching fraction of $D_s^{+}\to K_S^0{K}_S^0{e}^{+}{\nu }_e$ are set to be $7.3\times {10}^{-4}$ and $3.8\times {10}^{-4}$ at 90% confidence level, respectively. Our results provide valuable inputs to the understanding of the structures of light scalar mesons.

The $O(N)$ model with scalar quartic interactions at its ultraviolet fixed point, and the $O(N)$ model with scalar cubic interactions at its infrared fixed point are conjectured to be equivalent. This has been checked by comparing various features of the two models at their respective fixed points. Recently, the scaling dimensions of a family of operators of fixed charge $Q$ have been shown to match at the FPs up to $\mathcal{O}(\frac{1}{N^2})$ at leading order (LO) and next-to-leading order (NLO) in $Q$ using a semiclassical computation which is valid to all orders in the coupling. Here we perform a complementary but overlapping comparison using a perturbative calculation in six dimensions, up to three-loop order in the coupling, to compare these critical scaling dimensions beyond NLO in $Q$, in fact to all relevant orders in $Q$. We also obtain the corresponding results at $\mathcal{O}(\frac{1}{N^3})$ for the cubic theory.

Generalizing to relativistic exponential scaling and using the theory of noise from quantum fluctuations, it has been shown that one vacuum (Rindler, Hartle-Hawking, or Gibbons-Hawking for the cases of the uniformly accelerated detector, black hole, and de Sitter universe, respectively) can be understood as resulting from the scaling of quantum noise in another vacuum. We explore this idea more generally to establish a flat spacetime and curved spacetime analogy. For this purpose, we start by examining noise kernels for free fields in some well-known curved spacetimes, e.g., the spacetime of a charged black hole, the spacetime of a Kerr black hole, Schwarzschild-de Sitter, Schwarzschild anti–de Sitter, and Reissner-Nordstrom de Sitter spacetimes. Here, we consider a maximal analytical extension for all these spacetimes and different vacuum states. We show that the exponential scale transformation is responsible for the thermal nature of radiation.

The rapid increase in the number and precision of astrophysical probes of neutron stars in recent years allows for the inference of their equation of state. Observations target different macroscopic properties of neutron stars which vary from star to star, such as mass and radius, but the equation of state allows for a common description of all neutron stars. To connect these observations and infer the properties of dense matter and neutron stars simultaneously, models for the equation of state are introduced. Parametric models rely on carefully engineered functional forms that reproduce a large array of realistic equations of state. Such models benefit from their simplicity but are limited because any finite-parameter model cannot accurately approximate all possible equations of state. Nonparametric methods overcome this by increasing model freedom at the cost of increased complexity. In this study, we compare common parametric and nonparametric models, quantify the limitations of the former, and study the impact of modeling on our current understanding of high-density physics. We show that parametric models impose strongly model-dependent, and sometimes opaque, correlations between density scales. Such interdensity correlations result in tighter constraints that are unsupported by data and can lead to biased inference of the equation of state and of individual neutron star properties.

In the CHY-frame for the amplitudes, there are two kinds of singularities we need to deal with. The first one is the pole singularities when the kinematics is not general, such that some of $S_A\to 0$. The second one is the collapse of locations of points after solving scattering equations (i.e., the singular solutions). These two types of singularities are tightly related to each other, but the exact mapping is not well understood. In this paper, we have initiated the systematic study of the mapping. We have demonstrated the different mapping patterns using three typical situations, i.e., the factorization limit, the soft limit and the forward limit.