The discovery of hidden-charm pentaquarks and open-flavor tetraquarks motivates the search for even more exotic hadron configurations. In this work, we investigate genuinely exotic molecular pentaquark candidates comprising five different flavors, focusing on the ${\mathrm{\Xi }}_b^{(\prime ,*)}{\overline{D}}^{(*)}$ and ${\mathrm{\Xi }}_c^{(\prime ,*)}{B}^{(*)}$ systems. Employing the one-boson-exchange model with the $S\text{−}D$ wave mixing and coupled-channel dynamics, we identify the most promising molecular pentaquark candidates comprising five different flavors. These include the ${\mathrm{\Xi }}_b\overline{D}$, ${\mathrm{\Xi }}_b^{\prime }\overline{D}$, ${\mathrm{\Xi }}_{c}B$, and ${\mathrm{\Xi }}_c^{\prime }B$ states with $I(J^P)=0(1/2^{-})$, the ${\mathrm{\Xi }}_b{\overline{D}}^{*}$, ${\mathrm{\Xi }}_b^{\prime }{\overline{D}}^{*}$, ${\mathrm{\Xi }}_c{B}^{*}$, and ${\mathrm{\Xi }}_c^{\prime }{B}^{*}$ states with $I(J^P)=0(1/2^{-},3/2^{-})$, the ${\mathrm{\Xi }}_b^{*}\overline{D}$ and ${\mathrm{\Xi }}_c^{*}B$ states with $I(J^P)=0(3/2^{-})$, as well as the ${\mathrm{\Xi }}_b^{*}{\overline{D}}^{*}$ and ${\mathrm{\Xi }}_c^{*}{B}^{*}$ states with $I(J^P)=0(1/2^{-},3/2^{-},5/2^{-})$. Importantly, these loosely bound states exhibit pronounced spin splittings across different total angular momentum configurations after incorporating the spin-dependent interactions or the channel couplings. In addition, we identify several possible isovector molecular pentaquark candidates within the ${\mathrm{\Xi }}_b^{(\prime ,*)}{\overline{D}}^{(*)}$ and ${\mathrm{\Xi }}_c^{(\prime ,*)}{B}^{(*)}$ systems. Our predictions provide clear targets for experimental searches at facilities such as LHCb and Belle II, where the unique five-flavor quark configuration offers a distinctive experimental signature.

We perform for the first time a full study of spin correlations in inclusive production of WZ boson pairs at the LHC with leptonic decays in the presence of next-to-leading-order QCD corrections and of effects from a dimension-six operator in the Standard-Model effective field theory (SMEFT) modifying the electroweak triple-gauge coupling. We carry out the complete quantum-state tomography of the diboson system and relate its results to common purity and spin-entanglement markers, highlighting the sizeable impact of both QCD corrections and SMEFT insertions. Additionally, we show how a naïve truncation at dimension six in the SMEFT expansion of the spin-density matrix can lead to a cumbersome spin interpretation of the quantum-tomography results.

Using a data sample of $(2712.4\pm 14.3)\times {10}^6\psi (3686)$ events collected with the BESIII detector operating at the BEPCII collider, we report the first observation of the decays ${\chi }_{cJ}\to 2K^{+}2K^{-}\omega$ and ${\chi }_{cJ}\to \varphi K^{+}{K}^{-}\omega$ ($J=0$, 1, 2) via the radiative transitions $\psi (3686)\to \gamma {\chi }_{cJ}$. The branching fractions of these decays are measured for the first time, and the statistical significance for each signal exceeds $10\sigma$.

In this paper we continue the study of particlelike topological solitons with degenerate masses and their mixing due to worldline instantons. Previously, this phenomenon was studied in ($1+1$)-dimensional setups. Here we take a step further and consider degenerate vortices in $2+1$ dimensions. We find that, while classically such vortices may be degenerate, they generally mix and split at the quantum level. Supersymmetry protects BPS-saturated vortices only when the number of supercharges in the bulk is large enough.

The Standard Model of particle physics does not explain the origin of the universe’s baryon asymmetry or its primordial fluctuations. The Affleck-Dine mechanism is a well motivated scenario for generating the baryon asymmetry through the postinflationary dynamics of a complex scalar field with baryon number. The curvaton mechanism is a popular approach for producing curvature perturbations through the dynamics of a light spectator field that decays after inflation. We demonstrate that the same complex field can viably perform both roles without any modifications to the minimal realization of Affleck-Dine baryogenesis. This scenario can also accommodate appreciable levels of primordial non-Gaussianity, beyond those achievable with only a real-valued curvaton field, and may be observable with future cosmic microwave background experiments.

We propose a mechanism called sphalerogenesis to explain the baryon asymmetry of the Universe (BAU). The BAU is explained by a $CP$-violating decay of the electroweak sphaleron. We introduce a dimension-six operator constructed from weak gauge fields: $Q_{\tilde{W}}\sim {\mathrm{\Lambda }}^{-2}{\epsilon }_{ijk}{\tilde{W}}_{\mu \nu }^i{W}^{j\nu \rho }{W}_{\rho }^{k\mu }$. We find that the BAU can be explained if $\mathrm{\Lambda }\simeq 38\mathrm{TeV}$. This scenario can be tested by electron electric dipole moment measurements in the near future.

The singlet-doublet dark matter model offers a rich framework for exploring the nature of dark matter (DM) through its unique fermion structure. In this model, the important parameters are the singlet-doublet mass splitting $\mathrm{\Delta }M$, the singlet-doublet mixing angle $\sin \theta$, and the DM mass $M_{\mathrm{DM}}$. If the DM is assumed to be of Dirac nature, then the annihilation, coannihilation, and conversion driven processes combined allow a range of parameter space: $100\mathrm{GeV}\lesssim M_{\mathrm{DM}}\lesssim 750\mathrm{GeV}$ and ${10}^{-6}\lesssim \sin \theta \lesssim 0.04$ for $\mathrm{\Delta }M>1\mathrm{GeV}$. While the nature of DM, either Dirac or Majorana, is not known, in this work, we assume the singlet-doublet DM to be of Majorana type and find that the relic density and direct detection can be satisfied over a larger parameter space. In particular, the allowed ranges of DM mass and $\sin \theta$ are $100\mathrm{GeV}\lesssim M_{\mathrm{DM}}\lesssim 1750\mathrm{GeV}$ and $2\times {10}^{-7}\lesssim \sin \theta \lesssim 0.45$ for $\mathrm{\Delta }M>1\mathrm{GeV}$.

Cosmic filaments form the backbone of the cosmic web, yet their properties and evolution remain uncertain. We demonstrate that filaments provide a novel target for dark matter indirect detection. Using the Evolution and Assembly of Galaxies and their Environments hydrodynamical simulations, we investigate the dark matter density profiles in filaments and their implications for dark matter decay signals. We show that GeV-scale dark matter particles decaying into electron-positron pairs can produce detectable radio synchrotron emission. By leveraging stacked filament radio data, we place stringent constraints on the dark matter decay lifetime, improving existing limits by up to 2 orders of magnitude for strong filamentary magnetic fields. This work highlights cosmic filaments as a promising probe for dark matter, with implications for broader large-scale structure and cosmological simulation communities.

In a recent work, we argued that the net quark number gained by a bath of quarks and gluons upon bringing an external static quark probe, while being equal to 1 in the high temperature, deconfined phase, is equal to 0 or 3 in the low temperature, confined phase, depending on the value of the quark chemical potential. This establishes a clear-cut connection between the confinement of a medium as probed by order parameters such as the Polyakov loop, and the ability of that same medium to screen the quark probe into states with the same net quark content as mesons or baryons. In this work, we extend these findings to the SU($N_c$) color group, consider color probes in various (fundamental and nonfundamental) representations, and conjecture a rationale of how these results could be recovered from a purely thermodynamic argument that shortcuts the use of the Euclidean functional framework, while emphasizing the role of color $N_c$-ality as a proxy for center symmetry within the Minkowskian framework.

Using $(10087\pm 44)\times {10}^{6}J/\psi$ events collected with the BESIII detector, we perform the first amplitude analysis of the process $J/\psi \to \gamma \eta {\pi }^0$. The decay is dominated by the intermediate processes $J/\psi \to {\pi }^0{b}_1(1235{)}^0\to \gamma \eta {\pi }^0$, $J/\psi \to {\pi }^0\rho (1450{)}^0\to \gamma \eta {\pi }^0$ and $J/\psi \to \eta h_1(1170)\to \gamma \eta {\pi }^0$. Contributions from $J/\psi \to \gamma a_0(980{)}^0\to \gamma \eta {\pi }^0$, $J/\psi \to \gamma a_2(1320{)}^0\to \gamma \eta {\pi }^0$ and $J/\psi \to \gamma a_2(1700{)}^0\to \gamma \eta {\pi }^0$ are observed with a statistical significance exceeding $5\sigma$, constituting the first observation of radiative transitions of $J/\psi$ to isospin-triplet scalar mesons. The total branching fraction of $J/\psi \to \gamma \eta {\pi }^0$ is measured to be $(25.7\pm 0.3\pm 1.5)\times {10}^{-6}$, where the first uncertainty is statistical and the second systematic. This result is consistent with the previous measurement, with the precision improved by more than a factor of two.

Motivated by bulk replica wormholes, we study the boundary effective theory that describes the near-horizon fluctuations of a near-extremal Reissner-Nordström black hole. This theory consists of a Schwarzian mode and a $U(1)$ phase mode. We compute the partition function of this boundary theory on connected geometries, from which the entropy is derived. Our analysis reveals a rich phase structure, in which the dominance of connected or disconnected configurations leads to a phase transition controlled by the temperature and the coupling constants $C$, $K$, and $\mathcal{E}$ of the one-dimensional effective theory.

We study the entanglement produced in transverse momentum by two-particle scattering at high energy. Employing the S-matrix framework for the derivation of reduced density matrices, we formulate the entanglement entropy for an inelastic scattering as well as an elastic one. We display the formulas of the entanglement entropy in terms of two-body cross sections. We also derive the entanglement density as a function of the transverse momentum. As an application, we then focus on both forward elastic ($pn\to pn$) and inelastic ($pn\to np$) channels scattering allowing for a fruitful comparison of the two reactions with the same proton-neutron content. We evaluate the elastic and inelastic entanglement entropy by using known parametrizations of experimental data for neutron-proton reactions. Comparing those entanglement entropies, we observe that the inelastic scattering produces more overall entanglement than the elastic one in the $pn$ sector.

We study five-point off-shell conformal integrals and the associated half-Bogomol’nyi–Prasad–Sommerfield (BPS) correlation functions at two loops in the ’t Hooft coupling expansion of maximally supersymmetric Yang-Mills theory. We construct a basis of uniform-transcendental (UT) pure integrals spanning six distinct topologies by diagonalizing leading singularities subject to conformal invariance. By fixing conformal frames, this basis can be mapped to known two-loop four-mass integral families. We then compute the integrated results by combining canonical differential equations with integration-by-parts reduction. As an application, we present symbol-level integrated results for the two-loop five-point half-BPS correlators, including both maximal and nonmaximal sectors.

In this paper we explore the chaotic behavior of nonintegrable quantum field theories and compare them to integrable ones. We choose as prototypes the double sine-Gordon and the sine-Gordon models. We analyze their discrete spectrum determined by a truncation method. We examine the map of the corresponding energy eigenvalues to the eigenvalues of the random matrix theory Gaussian orthogonal ensemble (GOE). This is done by computing the following properties: (a) The distribution of the adjacent spacings and their ratios, (b) higher order spacings and ratios, (c) pair correlations, (d) spectral form factors, and (e) spectral rigidity. For these properties we determine the differences between the integrable and nonintegrable theories and verify that the former admits a Poisson behavior and the latter GOE (apart from the spectral rigidity, which shows mixed behavior).

Quantum field theory predicts that dynamical curved spacetimes can spontaneously excite particle pairs from the quantum vacuum, a phenomenon extensively studied in expanding universes and in scenarios involving gravitational collapse. In this article, we explore particle creation driven by radial oscillations of $3+1$-dimensional spherically symmetric compact objects, such as neutron stars, using a massless, minimally coupled scalar field as a reference model. We employ a toy model to describe the oscillatory dynamics and its coupling to the field modes, focusing on the resulting effects in the exterior spacetime of the star. The Bogoliubov coefficients relating the in and out vacua are computed nonperturbatively using high-precision numerical methods, without relying on weak-field, small-amplitude or small-velocity expansions. This allows us to determine the full particle spectrum and the total particle number in the strong-field and fully relativistic regime. Our analysis confirms the existence of particle creation in this setting and, crucially, reveals a distinct resonance structure in the spectrum.

The growing number of gravitational wave (GW) detections and the increasing sensitivity of GW detectors have enabled precision tests of general relativity (GR) in the strong-field regime. The recent observation of multiple quasinormal modes (QNMs) in GW250114 marks a major advance for observational black hole spectroscopy. This clear signal, together with the growing number of GW detections, highlights the need for accurate predictions of QNM spectra in beyond-GR theories in order to carry out precision searches for new physics. In this work, we continue to lay the foundation for such predictions using a modified Teukolsky formalism in conjunction with the eigenvalue perturbation method. We compute the spectral shifts of slowly rotating Johannsen–Psaltis black holes for $2\le \ell \le 10$, all $m$, and overtones $n=0,1,2$, and confirm the large-$\ell$ behavior of the modes by comparing with the Wentzel-Kramers-Brillouin approximation. We find that these black holes admit definite-parity modes but break the isospectrality between even- and odd-parity QNMs at all spins, and that the shifts depend linearly on $m$ for slow spins. We further derive a general parity condition that any beyond-GR modification to the metric must satisfy in order to support definite-parity modes, providing new insights into isospectrality breaking and parity structure in gravitational perturbations.

We investigate the post-Newtonian (PN) dynamics of energy-momentum squared gravity (EMSG), with particular emphasis on the possibility of self-acceleration in $N$-body systems. A central challenge in matter-type modified gravity theories, including EMSG, is the nonvanishing divergence of the energy-momentum tensor, arising from the nonminimal interaction between the standard and modified matter fields. This feature can, in principle, influence the $N$-body dynamics. In our previous work, its effects on the external-dependent part of the motion were studied in an EMSG class known as quadratic EMSG. Here, we extend the analysis to the internal-structure-dependent contributions, namely self-acceleration. To this end, we relax the reflection-symmetric assumption adopted in E. Nazari, Phys. Rev. D 110, 064023 (2024) and derive the complete equations of motion for a self-gravitating body in an N-body system up to the first PN order. By introducing a suitable expression for the center-of-mass acceleration and employing virial identities—including one newly emerging within the quadratic-EMSG framework—it is shown that self-acceleration vanishes. Furthermore, we establish a PN integral conservation law for the total momentum, demonstrating that, as in general relativity, EMSG admits a conserved linear momentum compatible with the absence of self-acceleration. Binary pulsar experiments provide stringent bounds on self-acceleration, and our analysis shows that, within the present level of accuracy, EMSG is consistent with these constraints. Therefore, the theory remains viable in the strong-gravity regime probed by binary pulsars.

We investigate the absorption and scattering by a Schwarzschild black hole in scalar-tensor theories of gravity, where the coupling between matter and the scalar field induces different models for the effective mass of the scalar field. In model I, a Bondi-type mass model described by the asymptotic mass ${\mu }_c$, horizon mass ${\mu }_H$, and profile slope $\lambda$, it is found that the absorption cross section increases with steeper $\lambda$, larger ${\mu }_c$ (especially at higher frequencies), or smaller ${\mu }_H$. The differential scattering cross section in this model shows the strongest dependence on the horizon mass ${\mu }_H$. When ${\mu }_H$ exceeds a critical value for a fixed incoming wave frequency $\omega$, no partial wave transmits into the black hole, flattening the differential scattering cross section as a function of angle before it increases again with further increase of ${\mu }_H$. Model II, which considers a truncated accretion region outside some radius $r_0$, contains a potential well in its effective scattering potential. Its absorption cross section decreases in the low-frequency region as the accretion radius $r_0$ decreases, and more importantly, it shows resonance peaks at the quasibound wave frequencies due to resonances induced by the potential well. The differential scattering cross sections show dips around intermediate scattering angles when the parameters (mainly ${\mu }_H$ and $\omega$) are such that the resonantly scattered and nonresonant waves interfere destructively around these angles. In both models, absorption exhibits a zero-absorption band as $\omega$ approaches ${\mu }_c$ from above, and in both absorption and scattering, the effects of the parameters are found to diminish in the high-frequency limit.

Chaotic motion near black holes has recently been examined through the lens of the Maldacena-Shenker-Stanford (MSS) chaos bound, but reported violations remain contradictory. A significant source of ambiguity stems from treating the particle angular momentum as an independently adjustable parameter instead of as a quantity fixed by the circular-orbit conditions. We develop a constrained framework in which the angular momentum is determined self-consistently from the geometry. Applied to the charged Kiselev black hole, this framework shows that certain previously reported violations of the chaos bound can be attributed to inconsistent parameter choices rather than to intrinsic curvature effects. By extending the analysis to geometries containing higher-order curvature terms, we find genuine chaos-bound violations at large charge-to-mass ratios, originating from curvature corrections rather than orbital parameters. Our approach, therefore, provides a systematic means to distinguish between parameter-induced (apparent) and curvature-induced (physical) violations in Einstein gravity and its extensions.

It is known that an entanglement-based witness of nonclassicality can be applied to testing quantum effects in gravity. Specifically, if a system can create entanglement between two quantum probes by local means only, then it must be nonclassical. Recently, claims have been made that collapse-based models of classical gravity, i.e., Diósi-Penrose model, can predict gravitationally induced entanglement between quantum objects, resulting in gravitationally induced entanglement is insufficient to conclude that gravity is fundamentally quantum, contrary to the witness statement. Here, we vindicate the witness. We analyze the underlying physics of collapse-based models for gravity and show that these models have nonlocal features, violating the assumption of locality. We suggest that the entanglement can be generated through quantumlike hidden detectors without interaction with the gravitational field.