We study the cosmological evolution and singularity crossing in the Bianchi-I universe filled with a conformally coupled scalar field and compare them with those of the Bianchi-I universe filled with a minimally coupled scalar field. We also write down the solution for the Bianchi-I Universe in the induced gravity cosmology.

We present a toy model of an axion gauge field inflation scenario that yields viable density and gravitational wave spectra. The scenario consists of an axionic inflaton in a steep potential that is effectively flattened by a coupling to a collection of non-Abelian gauge fields. The model predicts a blue-tilted gravitational wave spectrum that is dominated by one circular polarization, resulting in unique observational targets for cosmic microwave background and gravitational wave experiments. The handedness of the gravitational wave spectrum is incorporated in a model of leptogenesis through the axial-gravitational anomaly; assuming electroweak sphaeleron processes convert the lepton asymmetry into baryons, we predict an approximate lower bound on the tensor-to-scalar ratio $r\sim 3–4\times {10}^{-2}$ for models that also explain the matter-antimatter asymmetry of the Universe.

In light of the observed Galactic center gamma-ray excess, we investigate a simplified model, for which the scalar dark matter interacts with quarks through a pseudoscalar mediator. The viable regions of the parameter space, that can also account for the relic density and evade the current searches, are identified, if the low-velocity dark matter annihilates through an $s$-channel off shell mediator mostly into $\overline{b}b$, and/or annihilates directly into two hidden on shell mediators, which subsequently decay into the quark pairs. These two kinds of annihilations are $s$ wave. The projected monojet limit set by the high luminosity LHC sensitivity could constrain the favored parameter space, where the mediator’s mass is larger than the dark matter mass by a factor of 2. We show that the projected sensitivity of 15-year Fermi-LAT observations of dwarf spheroidal galaxies can provide a stringent constraint on the most parameter space allowed in this model. If the on shell mediator channel contributes to the dark matter annihilation cross sections over 50%, this model with a lighter mediator can be probed in the projected PICO-500L experiment.

We calculate the ratio $R_{\ell \ell }$ of same sign (SS) to opposite sign (OS) dileptons in type I and generalized inverse seesaw models and show that it can be anywhere between 0 and 1 depending on the detailed texture of the right-handed neutrino mass matrix. Measurement of $R_{\ell \ell }$ in hadron colliders can therefore provide a way to probe the nature of seesaw mechanism and also to distinguish between the two types of seesaw mechanisms. We work within the framework of left-right symmetric model as an example. We emphasize that coherence of the final states in the $W_R$ decay is crucial for this discussion and it requires the right-handed neutrinos to be highly degenerate. We isolate the range of parameters in the model where this effect is observable at the LHC and future colliders.

Studies of the charged lepton flavor violating process of ${\mu }^{-}{e}^{-}\to e^{-}{e}^{-}$ in muonic atoms by the four Fermi interaction [Y. Uesaka et al., Phys. Rev. D 93, 076006 (2016)] are extended to include the photonic interaction. The wave functions of a muon and electrons are obtained by solving the Dirac equation with the Coulomb interaction of a finite nuclear charge distribution. We find suppression of the ${\mu }^{-}{e}^{-}\to e^{-}{e}^{-}$ rate over the initial estimation for the photonic interaction, in contrast to enhancement for the four Fermi interaction. It is due to the Coulomb interaction of scattering states and relativistic lepton wave functions. This finding suggests that the atomic number dependence of the ${\mu }^{-}{e}^{-}\to e^{-}{e}^{-}$ rate could be used to distinguish between the photonic and the four Fermi interactions.

Effective couplings between light SU(2) vector and axial mesons and constituent quarks are calculated in the presence of a background electromagnetic field by considering a one dressed gluon exchange quark-quark interaction. The effective coupling constants, obtained from a large quark mass expansion, are expressed in terms of the Lagrangian parameters of the initial model and of components of the quark and nonperturbative gluon propagators. In spite of many possible couplings, only a few coupling constants emerge. As a second step, constituent quark-vector and axial mesons effective coupling constants are redefined to show explicit dependence on a weak background magnetic field. Ratios between the effective coupling constants are found in the limit of large quark effective mass and numerical estimates are presented.

The precise modeling of subatomic particle interactions and propagation through matter is paramount for the advancement of nuclear and particle physics searches and precision measurements. The most computationally expensive step in the simulation pipeline of a typical experiment at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) is the detailed modeling of the full complexity of physics processes that govern the motion and evolution of particle showers inside calorimeters. We introduce CaloGAN, a new fast simulation technique based on generative adversarial networks (GANs). We apply these neural networks to the modeling of electromagnetic showers in a longitudinally segmented calorimeter and achieve speedup factors comparable to or better than existing full simulation techniques on CPU ($100\times –1000\times$) and even faster on GPU (up to $\sim {10}^5\times$). There are still challenges for achieving precision across the entire phase space, but our solution can reproduce a variety of geometric shower shape properties of photons, positrons, and charged pions. This represents a significant stepping stone toward a full neural network-based detector simulation that could save significant computing time and enable many analyses now and in the future.

The magnetized phase diagram for three-flavor quark matter is studied within the Polyakov extended Nambu–Jona-Lasinio model. The order parameters are analyzed with special emphasis on the strange quark condensate. We show that the presence of an external magnetic field induces several critical endpoints (CEPs) in the strange sector, which arise due to the multiple phase transitions that the strange quark undergoes. The spinodal and binodal regions of the phase transitions are shown to increase with external magnetic field strength. The influence of strong magnetic fields on the isentropic trajectories around the several CEPs is analyzed. A focusing effect is observed on the region towards the CEPs that are related with the strange quark phase transitions. Compared to the chiral transitions, the deconfinement transition turns out to be less sensitive to the external magnetic field and the crossover nature is preserved over the whole phase diagram.

The $e^{+}{e}^{-}\to \eta {\pi }^{+}{\pi }^{-}$ cross section is measured at the Spherical Neutral Detector (SND) detector in the $\eta$ decay mode $\eta \to 3{\pi }^0$. The analysis is based on the data sample with an integrated luminosity of $32.7{\mathrm{pb}}^{-1}$ collected at the VEPP-2000 $e^{+}{e}^{-}$ collider in the center-of-mass energy range $\sqrt{s}=1.075–2.000\mathrm{GeV}$. The data obtained in the $\eta \to 3{\pi }^0$ decay mode are found to be in agreement with the previous SND measurements in the $\eta \to \gamma \gamma$ mode. Therefore the measurements in the two modes are combined.

We study the operators in the large $N$ tensor models, focusing mostly on the fermionic quantum mechanics with $O(N{)}^3$ symmetry which may be either global or gauged. In the model with global symmetry, we study the spectra of bilinear operators, which are in either the symmetric traceless or the antisymmetric representation of one of the $O(N)$ groups. In the symmetric traceless case, the spectrum of scaling dimensions is the same as in the Sachdev-Ye-Kitaev (SYK) model with real fermions; it includes the $h=2$ zero mode. For the operators antisymmetric in the two indices, the scaling dimensions are the same as in the additional sector found in the complex tensor and SYK models; the lowest $h=0$ eigenvalue corresponds to the conserved $O(N)$ charges. A class of singlet operators may be constructed from contracted combinations of $m$ symmetric traceless or antisymmetric two-particle operators. Their two-point functions receive contributions from $m$ melonic ladders. Such multiple ladders are a new phenomenon in the tensor model, which does not seem to be present in the SYK model. The more typical $2k$-particle operators do not receive any ladder corrections and have quantized large $N$ scaling dimensions $k/2$. We construct pictorial representations of various singlet operators with low $k$. For larger $k$, we use available techniques to count the operators and show that their number grows as $2^{k}k!$. As a consequence, the theory has a Hagedorn phase transition at the temperature which approaches zero in the large $N$ limit. We also study the large $N$ spectrum of low-lying operators in the Gurau-Witten model, which has $O(N{)}^6$ symmetry. We argue that it corresponds to one of the generalized SYK models constructed by Gross and Rosenhaus. Our paper also includes studies of the invariants in large $N$ tensor integrals with various symmetries.

The gauge and parametrization dependence is discussed in quantum gravity in an arbitrary dimension $D$. Explicit one-loop calculations are performed within the most general parametrization of quantum metric with seven arbitrary parameters. On the other hand, some of the gauge fixing parameters are fixed to make the calculations relatively simple. We confirm the general theorem stating that the on shell local terms in the one-loop effective action are independent of the gauge and parametrization ambiguity.

We investigate the phase structure of a charged AdS dilaton black hole in the extended phase space which takes the cosmological constant, i.e. the AdS-$\mathrm{\Lambda }$ parameter, as pressures. Through both thermal ensemble and quasinormal mode analysis, we find that stable phase of the black hole with nontrivial dilaton profiles always exists for both large and small couplings when the AdS-$\mathrm{\Lambda }$ is considered as dynamical degrees of freedom. This forms somewhat of a contrast with previous works. Our results provide new examples for the parallelism or equivalences between thermal ensemble methods and dynamic perturbation analysis for black hole phase structures.

Massive Nambu-Goldstone (mNG) bosons are quasiparticles the gap of which is determined exactly by symmetry. They appear whenever a symmetry is broken spontaneously in the ground state of a quantum many-body system and at the same time explicitly by the system’s chemical potential. In this paper, we revisit mNG bosons and show that apart from their gap symmetry also protects their scattering amplitudes. Just like for ordinary gapless Nambu-Goldstone (NG) bosons, the scattering amplitudes of mNG bosons vanish in the long-wavelength limit. Unlike for gapless NG bosons, this statement holds for any scattering process involving one or more external mNG states; there are no kinematic singularities associated with the radiation of a soft mNG boson from an on-shell initial or final state.

A binary neutron star coalescence event has recently been observed for the first time in gravitational waves, and many more detections are expected once current ground-based detectors begin operating at design sensitivity. As in the case of binary black holes, gravitational waves generated by binary neutron stars consist of inspiral, merger, and postmerger components. Detecting the latter is important because it encodes information about the nuclear equation of state in a regime that cannot be probed prior to merger. The postmerger signal, however, can only be expected to be measurable by current detectors for events closer than roughly ten megaparsecs, which given merger rate estimates implies a low probability of observation within the expected lifetime of these detectors. We carry out Monte Carlo simulations showing that the dominant postmerger signal (the $\ell =m=2$ mode) from individual binary neutron star mergers may not have a good chance of observation even with the most sensitive future ground-based gravitational wave detectors proposed so far (the Einstein Telescope and Cosmic Explorer, for certain equations of state, assuming a full year of operation, the latest merger rates, and a detection threshold corresponding to a signal-to-noise ratio of 5). For this reason, we propose two methods that stack the postmerger signal from multiple binary neutron star observations to boost the postmerger detection probability. The first method follows a commonly used practice of multiplying the Bayes factors of individual events. The second method relies on an assumption that the mode phase can be determined from the inspiral waveform, so that coherent mode stacking of the data from different events becomes possible. We find that both methods significantly improve the chances of detecting the dominant postmerger signal, making a detection very likely after a year of observation with Cosmic Explorer for certain equations of state. We also show that in terms of detection, coherent stacking is more efficient in accumulating confidence for the presence of postmerger oscillations in a signal than the first method. Moreover, assuming the postmerger signal is detected with Cosmic Explorer via stacking, we estimate through a Fisher analysis that the peak frequency can be measured to a statistical error of $\sim 4–20\mathrm{Hz}$ for certain equations of state. Such an error corresponds to a neutron star radius measurement to within $\sim 15–56\mathrm{m}$, a fractional relative error $\sim 4\%$, suggesting that systematic errors from theoretical modeling $(\gtrsim 100\mathrm{m}$) may dominate the error budget.

We analytically investigate the spin-1 quasinormal mode frequencies and radial wave functions of Schwarzschild black hole spacetime. We formally determine these frequencies and wave functions to arbitrary order as an expansion for a large imaginary part of the frequency (i.e., large $n$, where $n$ is the overtone number). As an example of the practicality of this formal procedure, we explicitly calculate the asymptotic behavior of the frequencies up to order $n^{-5/2}$ analytically and the three higher orders in terms of a numerically determined parameter.

Starting from the second post-Keplerian (2PK) Hamiltonian describing the conservative part of the two-body dynamics in massless scalar-tensor (ST) theories, we build an effective-one-body (EOB) Hamiltonian which is a $\nu$ deformation (where $\nu =0$ is the test mass limit) of the analytically known ST Hamiltonian of a test particle. This ST-EOB Hamiltonian leads to a simple (yet canonically equivalent) formulation of the conservative 2PK two-body problem, but also defines a resummation of the dynamics which is well-suited to ST regimes that depart strongly from general relativity (GR) and which may provide information on the strong field dynamics; in particular, the ST innermost stable circular orbit location and associated orbital frequency. Results will be compared and contrasted with those deduced from the ST-deformation of the (5PN) GR-EOB Hamiltonian previously obtained in [Phys. Rev. D 95, 124054 (2017)].

The uniqueness of the Kottler/Schwarzschild-de Sitter solution (KSdS) of the vacuum Einstein equations with positive cosmological constant is discussed and certain putative alternatives are shown to either solve different equations or to be the KSdS solution in disguise. A simultaneous no-hair and cosmic no-hair theorem for the KSdS geometry in the presence of an imperfect fluid is proved.

The second-order post-Newtonian solution for the light propagation in the field of Kerr-Newman black hole is achieved via an iterative method. Based on this result, we further obtain the second-order post-Newtonian light deflection in Kerr-Newman spacetime, which is formulated in an united form for any arbitrarily incident directions. All results are exhibited in the coordinate system constituted by the initial light-direction vector, the impact vector, and their cross-product.