In an asymptotically flat spacetime of dimension $d>3$ and with the Newtonian gravitational constant $G$, a spherical black hole of initial horizon radius $r_h$ and mass $M\sim r_h^{d-3}/G$ has a total decay time to Hawking emission of $t_d\sim r_h^{d-1}/G\sim G^{2/(d-3)}{M}^{(d-1)/(d-3)}$ which grows without bound as the radius $r_h$ and mass $M$ are taken to infinity. However, in asymptotically anti–de Sitter spacetime with a length scale $\ell$ and with absorbing boundary conditions at infinity, the total Hawking decay time does not diverge as the mass and radius go to infinity but instead remains bounded by a time of the order of ${\ell }^{d-1}/G$.

We consider several cosmological models which allow for nongravitational direct couplings between dark matter and dark energy. The distinguishing cosmological features of these couplings can be probed by current cosmological observations, thus enabling us to place constraints on these specific interactions which are composed of the conformal and disformal coupling functions. We perform a global analysis in order to independently constrain the conformal, disformal, and mixed interactions between dark matter and dark energy by combining current data from: Planck observations of the cosmic microwave background radiation anisotropies, a combination of measurements of baryon acoustic oscillations, a supernova type Ia sample, a compilation of Hubble parameter measurements estimated from the cosmic chronometers approach, direct measurements of the expansion rate of the Universe today, and a compilation of growth of structure measurements. We find that in these coupled dark-energy models, the influence of the local value of the Hubble constant does not significantly alter the inferred constraints when we consider joint analyses that include all cosmological probes. Moreover, the parameter constraints are remarkably improved with the inclusion of the growth of structure data set measurements. We find no compelling evidence for an interaction within the dark sector of the Universe.

A theoretically interesting and practically important question in cosmology is the reconstruction of the initial density distribution provided a late-time density field. This is a long-standing question with a revived interest recently, especially in the context of optimally extracting the baryonic acoustic oscillation (BAO) signals from observed galaxy distributions. We present a new efficient method to carry out this reconstruction, which is based on numerical solutions to the nonlinear partial differential equation that governs the mapping between the initial Lagrangian and final Eulerian coordinates of particles in evolved density fields. This is motivated by numerical simulations of the quartic Galileon gravity model, which has similar equations that can be solved effectively by multigrid Gauss-Seidel relaxation. The method is based on mass conservation, and does not assume any specific cosmological model. Our test shows that it has a performance comparable to that of state-of-the-art algorithms that were very recently put forward in the literature, with the reconstructed density field over $\sim 80\%$ (50%) correlated with the initial condition at $k\lesssim 0.6h/\mathrm{Mpc}$ ($1.0h/\mathrm{Mpc}$). With an example, we demonstrate that this method can significantly improve the accuracy of BAO reconstruction.

We present the two-point function from the fast and accurate spherical Bessel transformation (2-FAST) algorithm for a fast and accurate computation of integrals involving one or two spherical Bessel functions. These types of integrals occur when projecting the galaxy power spectrum $P(k)$ onto the configuration space, ${\xi }_{\ell }^{\nu }(r)$, or spherical harmonic space, $C_{\ell }(\chi ,{\chi }^{\prime })$. First, we employ the FFTLog transformation of the power spectrum to divide the calculation into $P(k)$-dependent coefficients and $P(k)$-independent integrations of basis functions multiplied by spherical Bessel functions. We find analytical expressions for the latter integrals in terms of special functions, for which recursion provides a fast and accurate evaluation. The algorithm, therefore, circumvents direct integration of highly oscillating spherical Bessel functions.

Our code is available at https://github.com/hsgg/twoFAST.

Primordial inflation may represent the most powerful collider to test high-energy physics models. In this paper we study the impact on the inflationary power spectrum of the comoving curvature perturbation in the specific model where massive higher spin fields are rendered effectively massless during a de Sitter epoch through suitable couplings to the inflaton field. In particular, we show that such fields with spin $s$ induce a distinctive statistical anisotropic signal on the power spectrum, in such a way that not only the usual $g_{2M}$-statistical anisotropy coefficients, but also higher-order ones (i.e., $g_{4M},g_{6M},\dots ,g_{(2s-2)M}$ and $g_{(2s)M}$) are nonvanishing. We examine their imprints in the cosmic microwave background and galaxy power spectra. Our Fisher matrix forecasts indicate that the detectability of $g_{LM}$ depends very weakly on $L$: all coefficients could be detected in near future if their magnitudes are bigger than about ${10}^{-3}$.

The second-order nonlinear responses of inviscid chiral fluids near local equilibrium are investigated by applying the chiral kinetic theory (CKT) incorporating side-jump effects. It is shown that the local equilibrium distribution function can be nontrivially introduced in a comoving frame with respect to the fluid velocity when the quantum corrections in collisions are involved. For the study of anomalous transport, contributions from both quantum corrections in anomalous hydrodynamic equations of motion and those from the CKT and Wigner functions are considered under the relaxation-time (RT) approximation, which result in anomalous charge Hall currents propagating along the cross product of the background electric field and the temperature (or chemical-potential) gradient and of the temperature and chemical-potential gradients. On the other hand, the nonlinear quantum correction on the charge density vanishes in the classical RT approximation, which in fact satisfies the matching condition given by the anomalous equation obtained from the CKT.

We study a variation of the dynamic universality class of model H in a spatial dimension of $d=4-\epsilon$, by frustrating charge diffusion and momentum density fluctuations along $d_T=1$ or $d_T=2$ dimensions, while keeping the same dynamics of model H in the other $d_L=d-d_T$ dimensions. The case of $d_T=2$ describes the QCD critical point in a background magnetic field. We find that these models belong to a different dynamical universality class due to extended conservation laws compared to the model H, although the static universality class remains the same as the 3-dimensional Ising model. We compute the dynamic critical exponents of these models in first order of $\epsilon$-expansion to find that $x_{\lambda }\approx 0.847\epsilon$, $x_{\overline{\eta }}\approx 0.153\epsilon$, and $z=4-x_{\lambda }\approx 3.15$ when $\epsilon =1$ and $d_T=2$. For $d_T=1$ the results are numerically similar to the model H values: $z\approx 3.08$.

The MATHUSLA detector is a simple large-volume tracking detector to be located on the surface above one of the general-purpose experiments at the Large Hadron Collider. This detector was proposed in [J. P. Chou, D. Curtin, and H. J. Lubatti, Phys. Lett. B 767, 29 (2017)] to detect exotic, neutral, long-lived particles that might be produced in high-energy proton-proton collisions. In this paper, we consider the use of the limited information that MATHULSA would provide on the decay products of the long-lived particle. For the case in which the long-lived particle is pair-produced in Higgs boson decays, we show that it is possible to measure the mass of this particle and determine the dominant decay mode with less than 100 observed events. We discuss the ability of MATHUSLA to distinguish the production mode of the long-lived particle and to determine its mass and spin in more general cases.

We analyze the theoretical and phenomenological considerations for the electroweak phase transition and dark matter in an extension of the standard model with a complex scalar singlet (cxSM). In contrast with earlier studies, we use a renormalization group improved scalar potential and treat its thermal history in a gauge-invariant manner. We find that the parameter space consistent with a strong first-order electroweak phase transition (SFOEWPT) and present dark matter phenomenological constraints is significantly restricted compared to results of a conventional, gauge-noninvariant analysis. In the simplest variant of the cxSM, recent LUX data and a SFOEWPT require a dark matter mass close to half the mass of the standard model-like Higgs boson. We also comment on various caveats regarding the perturbative treatment of the phase transition dynamics.

We propose the use of three-dimensional Dirac materials as targets for direct detection of sub-MeV dark matter. Dirac materials are characterized by a linear dispersion for low-energy electronic excitations, with a small band gap of $\mathcal{O}(\mathrm{meV})$ if lattice symmetries are broken. Dark matter at the keV scale carrying kinetic energy as small as a few meV can scatter and excite an electron across the gap. Alternatively, bosonic dark matter as light as a few meV can be absorbed by the electrons in the target. We develop the formalism for dark matter scattering and absorption in Dirac materials and calculate the experimental reach of these target materials. We find that Dirac materials can play a crucial role in detecting dark matter in the keV to MeV mass range that scatters with electrons via a kinetically mixed dark photon, as the dark photon does not develop an in-medium effective mass. The same target materials provide excellent sensitivity to absorption of light bosonic dark matter in the meV to hundreds of meV mass range, superior to all other existing proposals when the dark matter is a kinetically mixed dark photon.

Flavor symmetries are useful to realize fermion flavor structures in the standard model (SM). In particular, the discrete $A_4$ symmetry is used to realize lepton flavor structures, and some scalars—called flavons—are introduced to break this symmetry. In many models, flavons are assumed to be much heavier than the electroweak scale. However, our previous work showed that a flavon mass around 100 GeV is allowed by experimental constraints in the $A_4$ symmetric model with a residual $Z_3$ symmetry. In this paper, we discuss collider searches for such a light flavon ${\phi }_T$. We find that electron-photon collisions at the International Linear Collider have advantages for searching for these signals. In electron-photon collisions, flavons are produced as $e^{-}\gamma \to l^{-}{\phi }_T$ and decay into two charged leptons. Then, we analyze signals of the flavor-conserving final state ${\tau }^{+}{\tau }^{-}{e}^{-}$ and the flavor-violating final states ${\tau }^{+}{\mu }^{-}{\mu }^{-}$ and ${\mu }^{+}{\tau }^{-}{\tau }^{-}$ by carrying out numerical simulations. For the former final state, SM background can be strongly suppressed by imposing cuts on the invariant masses of final-state leptons. For the latter final states, SM background is extremely small, because in the SM there are no such flavor-violating final states. We then find that sufficient discovery significance can be obtained, even if flavons are heavier than the lower limits from flavor physics.

We investigate monotop signatures arising from phenomenological models of fermionic top partners, which are degenerate in mass and decay into a bosonic dark matter candidate, either spin 0 or spin 1. Such a model provides a monotop signature as a smoking gun, while conventional searches with $t\overline{t}+$ missing transverse momentum are limited. Two such scenarios, (i) a phenomenological third generation extradimensional model with excited top and electroweak sectors, and (ii) a model where only a top partner and a dark matter particle are added to the standard model, are studied in the degenerate mass regime. We find that in the case of extra dimension a number of different processes give rise to effectively the same monotop final state, and a great gain can be obtained in the sensitivity for this channel. We show that the monotop search can explore top-partner masses up to 630 and 300 GeV for the third generation extradimensional model and the minimal fermionic top-partner model, respectively, at the high luminosity LHC.

We consider QCD at strong coupling with scalar quarks coupled to a chemical potential. Performing the link integrals we present a diagrammatic representation of the path integral weight. It is based on mesonic and baryonic building blocks, in close analogy to fermionic QCD. Likewise, the baryon loops are subject to a manifest conservation of the baryon number. The sign problem is expected to disappear in this representation and we do confirm this for three flavors, where a scalar baryon can be built and, thus, a dependence on the chemical potential occurs. For higher flavor number, we analyze examples for a potential sign problem in the baryon sector and conjecture that all weights are positive upon exploring the current conservation of each flavor.

We construct the Lorentz-invariant chiral Lagrangians up to the order $\mathcal{O}(p^4)$ by including $\mathrm{\Delta }(1232)$ as an explicit degree of freedom. A full one-loop investigation on processes involving $\mathrm{\Delta }(1232)$ can be performed with them. For the $\pi \mathrm{\Delta }\mathrm{\Delta }$ Lagrangian, one obtains 38 independent terms at the order $\mathcal{O}(p^3)$ and 318 independent terms at the order $\mathcal{O}(p^4)$. For the $\pi N\mathrm{\Delta }$ Lagrangian, we get 33 independent terms at the order $\mathcal{O}(p^3)$ and 218 independent terms at the order $\mathcal{O}(p^4)$. The heavy baryon projection is also briefly discussed.

In this paper we propose to investigate the transverse single spin asymmetry in the inelastic $J/\mathrm{\Psi }$ photoproduction in $p^{\uparrow }p$ and $p^{\uparrow }A$ collisions at RHIC energies. At leading order this process probes the gluon Sivers function. We predict large values for the cross sections, which indicates that its experimental analysis is, in principle, feasible. The rapidity dependence of the single spin asymmetry is presented. We obtain that the asymmetry is strongly dependent on the model used for the gluon Sivers function and that it can be probed by the analysis of the $J/\mathrm{\Psi }$ production at forward rapidities. Our results indicate that a future experimental analysis of this process can be useful to constrain the gluon Sivers function.

Polarization transfer (PT) observables in the single pion production induced by the charged current interaction of the neutrino with the nucleon are examined. The polarization components of the final nucleon and the charged lepton are calculated within two models for the pion production. The predictions are made for neutrino energy of the order of 1 GeV as well as for the T2K energy distribution. It is demonstrated that the PT observables, the degree of polarization and the polarization components of outgoing fermions, are sensitive to assumptions about the nonresonant background model. In particular it is shown that the normal components of the polarization of the outgoing nucleon and the lepton are determined by the interference between the resonant (RES) and nonresonant (NB) amplitudes. Moreover, the sign of the normal component of the polarization of the charged lepton is fixed by the relative sign between the RES and the NB amplitudes.

This paper reports the first differential measurement of the charged-current interaction cross section of ${\nu }_{\mu }$ on water with no pions in the final state. This flux-averaged measurement has been made using the T2K experiment’s off-axis near detector, and is reported in doubly differential bins of muon momentum and angle. The flux-averaged total cross section in a restricted region of phase space was found to be $\sigma =(0.95\pm 0.08(\text{stat})\pm 0.06(\text{det syst})\pm 0.04(\text{model syst})\pm 0.08(\text{flux}))\times {10}^{-38}{\mathrm{cm}}^2/\mathrm{n}$.

I propose a self-dual deformation of the classical phase space of lattice Yang-Mills theory, in which both the electric and magnetic fluxes take value in the compact gauge Lie group. A local construction of the deformed phase space requires the machinery of “quasi-Hamiltonian spaces” by Alekseev et al., which is reviewed here. The results is a full-fledged finite-dimensional and gauge-invariant phase space, the self-duality properties of which are largely enhanced in ($3+1$) spacetime dimensions. This enhancement is due to a correspondence with the moduli space of an auxiliary noncommutative flat connection living on a Riemann surface defined from the lattice itself, which in turn equips the duality between electric and magnetic fluxes with a neat geometrical interpretation in terms of a Heegaard splitting of the space manifold. Finally, I discuss the consequences of the proposed deformation on the quantization of the phase space, its quantum gravitational interpretation, as well as its relevance for the construction of ($3+1$)-dimensional topological field theories with defects.

It has been proved that arbitrarily high-energy collision between two particles can occur near the horizon of an extremal Kerr black hole as long as the energy $E$ and angular momentum $L$ of one particle satisfies a critical relation, which is called the Banados, Silk, and West mechanism. Previous researchers mainly concentrated on the geodesic motion of particles. In this paper, we will take the spinning particle that will not move along a timelike geodesic into our consideration; hence, another parameter $s$ describing the particle’s spin angular momentum was introduced. By employing the Mathisson-Papapetrou-Dixon equation describing the movement of the spinning particle, we will explore whether a Kerr-Sen black hole that is slightly different from the Kerr black hole can be used to accelerate a spinning particle to an arbitrarily high energy. We found that when one of the two colliding particles satisfies a critical relation between the energy $E$ and the total angular momentum $J$, or has a critical spinning angular momentum $s_c$, a divergence of the center-of-mass energy $E_{\mathrm{cm}}$ will be obtained.