Hybrid inflation, driven by a Fayet-Iliopoulos (FI) D term, is an intriguing inflationary model. In its usual formulation, it however suffers from several shortcomings. These pertain to the origin of the FI mass scale, the stability of scalar fields during inflation, gravitational corrections in supergravity, as well as to the latest constraints from the cosmic microwave background. We demonstrate that these issues can be remedied if D-term inflation is realized in the context of strongly coupled supersymmetric gauge theories. We suppose that the D term is generated in consequence of dynamical supersymmetry breaking. Moreover, we assume canonical kinetic terms in the Jordan frame as well as an approximate shift symmetry along the inflaton direction. This provides us with a unified picture of D-term inflation and high-scale supersymmetry breaking. The D term may be associated with a gauged $U(1{)}_{B-L}$, so that the end of inflation spontaneously breaks $B-L$ in the visible sector.

A lattice computation of the leading-order hadronic contribution to the muon anomalous magnetic moment can potentially help reduce the error on the Standard Model prediction for this quantity, if sufficient control of all systematic errors affecting such a computation can be achieved. One of these systematic errors is that associated with the extrapolation to the physical pion mass from values on the lattice larger than the physical pion mass. We investigate this extrapolation assuming lattice pion masses in the range of 200 to 400 MeV with the help of two-loop chiral perturbation theory, and we find that such an extrapolation is unlikely to lead to control of this systematic error at the 1% level. This remains true even if various tricks to improve the reliability of the chiral extrapolation employed in the literature are taken into account. In addition, while chiral perturbation theory also predicts the dependence on the pion mass of the leading-order hadronic contribution to the muon anomalous magnetic moment as the chiral limit is approached, this prediction turns out to be of no practical use because the physical pion mass is larger than the muon mass that sets the scale for the onset of this behavior.

New resonance ${\mathrm{\Lambda }}_c(2860{)}^{+}$, reported by the LHCb Collaboration, is a key to establish the $D$-wave charmed and charmed-strange baryon families. In this work, we first carry out an analysis of mass spectra of the $\lambda$-mode excited charmed and charmed-strange baryon states, which may reveal the relation of ${\mathrm{\Lambda }}_c(2860{)}^{+}$, ${\mathrm{\Lambda }}_c(2880{)}^{+}$, ${\mathrm{\Xi }}_c(3055{)}^{+}$, and ${\mathrm{\Xi }}_c(3080{)}^{+}$, i.e., ${\mathrm{\Lambda }}_c(2860{)}^{+}$ and ${\mathrm{\Lambda }}_c(2880{)}^{+}$ can form a $D$-wave doublet $[3/2^{+},5/2^{+}]$, while ${\mathrm{\Xi }}_c(3055{)}^{+}$ and ${\mathrm{\Xi }}_c(3080{)}^{+}$ are the strange partners of ${\mathrm{\Lambda }}_c(2860{)}^{+}$ and ${\mathrm{\Lambda }}_c(2880{)}^{+}$, respectively. Further study of their two-body Okubo-Zweig-Iizuka-allowed decays supports ${\mathrm{\Lambda }}_c(2860{)}^{+}$ and ${\mathrm{\Xi }}_c(3055{)}^{+}$ as the $D$-wave charmed and charmed-strange baryons, respectively, with $J^P=3/2^{+}$. For ${\mathrm{\Lambda }}_c(2880{)}^{+}$ and ${\mathrm{\Xi }}_c(3080{)}^{+}$, however, there exist some difficulties under the $D$-wave assignment with $J^P=5/2^{+}$, since the experimental widths, and some ratios of partial width of ${\mathrm{\Lambda }}_c(2880{)}^{+}$ and ${\mathrm{\Xi }}_c(3080{)}^{+}$, cannot be reproduced in our calculation.

We explore polarized heavy quarkonium production using the color evaporation model at leading order. We present the polarized to total yield ratio as a function of center of mass energy and rapidity in $p+p$ collisions. At energies far above the $Q\overline{Q}$ production threshold, we find charmonium and bottomonium production to be longitudinally polarized ($J_z=0$). The quarkonium states are also longitudinally polarized at central rapidity, becoming transversely polarized ($J_z=\pm 1$) at the most forward rapidities.

The photoproduction of doubly heavy baryon, ${\mathrm{\Xi }}_{cc}$, ${\mathrm{\Xi }}_{bc}$, and ${\mathrm{\Xi }}_{bb}$, is predicted within the nonrelativistic QCD at the Large Hadron Electron Collider (LHeC). The ${\mathrm{\Xi }}_{Q{Q}^{\prime }}$ production via the photon-gluon fusing channel $\gamma +g\to ⟨Q{Q}^{\prime }⟩[n]+\overline{Q}+{\overline{Q}}^{\prime }$ and the extrinsic heavy quark channel $\gamma +Q\to ⟨Q{Q}^{\prime }⟩[n]+{\overline{Q}}^{\prime }$ have been considered, where $Q$ or $Q^{\prime }$ stand for heavy $c$ or $b$ quark and $⟨Q{Q}^{\prime }⟩[n]$ stands for a $Q{Q}^{\prime }$ diquark with given spin- and color- configurations [$n$]. The diquark shall fragmentate into ${\mathrm{\Xi }}_{Q{Q}^{\prime }}$ baryon with high probability. For ${\mathrm{\Xi }}_{cc}$ and ${\mathrm{\Xi }}_{bb}$ production, [$n$] equals $[{{}^{1}S}_0{]}_{\mathbf{6}}$ (in configurations spin-singlet ${}^1{S}_0$-wave and color-sextuplet $\mathbf{6}$) or $[{{}^{3}S}_1{]}_{\overline{\mathbf{3}}}$ (in configurations spin-triplet ${}^3{S}_1$-wave and color-antitriplet $\overline{\mathbf{3}}$) and for ${\mathrm{\Xi }}_{bc}$ production, [$n$] equals $[{{}^{1}S}_0{]}_{\overline{\mathbf{3}}}$, $[{{}^{1}S}_0{]}_{\mathbf{6}}$, $[{{}^{3}S}_1{]}_{\overline{\mathbf{3}}}$, or $[{{}^{3}S}_1{]}_{\mathbf{6}}$. A detailed comparison of those channels and configurations on total and differential cross sections, together with their uncertainties, is presented. We find the dominant contributions for ${\mathrm{\Xi }}_{Q{Q}^{\prime }}$ production are from extrinsic heavy quark channel and for $[{{}^{3}S}_1{]}_{\overline{\mathbf{3}}}$ configuration, while other diquark states can also provide sizable contributions to the ${\mathrm{\Xi }}_{Q{Q}^{\prime }}$ production. As a combination of all the mentioned channels and configurations and by taking $m_c=1.80\pm 0.10\mathrm{GeV}$ and $m_b=5.1\pm 0.20\mathrm{GeV}$, we observe that $(6.70_{-1.10}^{+1.40})\times 10^3$ ${\mathrm{\Xi }}_{bb}$, $(8.81_{-2.20}^{+3.08})\times 10^6$ ${\mathrm{\Xi }}_{cc}$, and $(4.63_{-0.92}^{+1.21})\times 10^5$ ${\mathrm{\Xi }}_{bc}$ events can be generated at the LHeC in one operation year with colliding energy $\sqrt{S}=1.30\mathrm{TeV}$ and luminosity $\mathcal{L}\simeq 10^{33}{\mathrm{cm}}^{-2}{\mathrm{s}}^{-1}$. Thus, the LHeC shall help us to get more information about the doubly heavy baryon, especially for ${\mathrm{\Xi }}_{cc}$ and ${\mathrm{\Xi }}_{bc}$.

We present an amplitude analysis of the decay $D^0\to K^{-}{\pi }^{+}{\pi }^{+}{\pi }^{-}$ based on a data sample of $2.93{\mathrm{fb}}^{-1}$ acquired by the BESIII detector at the $\psi (3770)$ resonance. With a nearly background free sample of about 16000 events, we investigate the substructure of the decay and determine the relative fractions and the phases among the different intermediate processes. Our amplitude model includes the two-body decays $D^0\to {\overline{K}}^{*0}{\rho }^0$, $D^0\to K^{-}{a}_1^{+}(1260)$ and $D^0\to K_1^{-}(1270){\pi }^{+}$, the three-body decays $D^0\to {\overline{K}}^{*0}{\pi }^{+}{\pi }^{-}$ and $D^0\to K^{-}{\pi }^{+}{\rho }^0$, as well as the four-body nonresonant decay $D^0\to K^{-}{\pi }^{+}{\pi }^{+}{\pi }^{-}$. The dominant intermediate process is $D^0\to K^{-}{a}_1^{+}(1260)$, accounting for a fit fraction of 54.6%.

We present measurements of the neutrino and antineutrino total charged-current cross sections on carbon and their ratio using the MINERvA scintillator-tracker. The measurements span the energy range 2–22 GeV and were performed using forward and reversed horn focusing modes of the Fermilab low-energy NuMI beam to obtain large neutrino and antineutrino samples. The flux is obtained using a subsample of charged-current events at low hadronic energy transfer along with precise higher energy external neutrino cross section data overlapping with our energy range between 12–22 GeV. We also report on the antineutrino-neutrino cross section ratio, $R_{\mathrm{CC}}$, which does not rely on external normalization information. Our ratio measurement, obtained within the same experiment using the same technique, benefits from the cancellation of common sample systematic uncertainties and reaches a precision of $\sim 5\%$ at low energy. Our results for the antineutrino-nucleus scattering cross section and for $R_{\mathrm{CC}}$ are the most precise to date in the energy range $E_{\nu }<6\mathrm{GeV}$.

A search for a long-lived scalar particle $\chi$ is performed, looking for the decay $B^{+}\to K^{+}\chi$ with $\chi \to {\mu }^{+}{\mu }^{-}$ in $pp$ collision data corresponding to an integrated luminosity of $3{\mathrm{fb}}^{-1}$, collected by the LHCb experiment at center-of-mass energies of $\sqrt{s}=7$ and 8 TeV. This new scalar particle, predicted by hidden sector models, is assumed to have a narrow width. The signal would manifest itself as an excess in the dimuon invariant mass distribution over the Standard Model background. No significant excess is observed in the accessible ranges of mass $250<m(\chi )<4700\mathrm{MeV}/c^2$ and lifetime $0.1<\tau (\chi )<1000\mathrm{ps}$. Upper limits on the branching fraction $\mathcal{B}(B^{+}\to K^{+}\chi ({\mu }^{+}{\mu }^{-}))$ at 95% confidence level are set as a function of $m(\chi )$ and $\tau (\chi )$, varying between $2\times {10}^{-10}$ and ${10}^{-7}$. These are the most stringent limits to date. The limits are interpreted in the context of a model with a light inflaton particle.

Tunneling in quantum field theory is worth understanding properly, not least because it controls the long-term fate of our Universe. There are, however, a number of features of tunneling rate calculations which lack a desirable transparency, such as the necessity of analytic continuation, the appropriateness of using an effective instead of classical potential, and the sensitivity to short-distance physics. This paper attempts to review in pedagogical detail the physical origin of tunneling and its connection to the path integral. Both the traditional potential-deformation method and a recent, more direct, propagator-based method are discussed. Some new insights from using approximate semiclassical solutions are presented. In addition, we explore the sensitivity of the lifetime of our Universe to short-distance physics, such as quantum gravity, emphasizing a number of important subtleties.

We study two-dimensional $f(\tilde{R})$ Hořava-Lifshitz gravity from the Hamiltonian point of view. We determine constraints structure with emphasis on the careful separation of the second class constraints and global first class constraints. We determine number of physical degrees of freedom and also discuss gauge fixing of the global first class constraints.

Since all Einstein spacetimes are vacuum solutions to quadratic gravity in four dimensions, in this paper we study various aspects of non-Einstein vacuum solutions to this theory. Most such known solutions are of traceless Ricci and Petrov type N with a constant Ricci scalar. Thus we assume the Ricci scalar to be constant which leads to a substantial simplification of the field equations. We prove that a vacuum solution to quadratic gravity with traceless Ricci tensor of type N and aligned Weyl tensor of any Petrov type is necessarily a Kundt spacetime. This will considerably simplify the search for new non-Einstein solutions. Similarly, a vacuum solution to quadratic gravity with traceless Ricci type III and aligned Weyl tensor of Petrov type II or more special is again necessarily a Kundt spacetime. Then we study the general role of conformal transformations in constructing vacuum solutions to quadratic gravity. We find that such solutions can be obtained by solving one nonlinear partial differential equation for a conformal factor on any Einstein spacetime or, more generally, on any background with vanishing Bach tensor. In particular, we show that all geometries conformal to Kundt are either Kundt or Robinson–Trautman, and we provide some explicit Kundt and Robinson–Trautman solutions to quadratic gravity by solving the above mentioned equation on certain Kundt backgrounds.

We have developed a new gravitational-wave (GW) detector, TOrsion-Bar Antenna (TOBA), which has a multiple-output configuration. TOBA is a detector with bar-shaped test masses that are rotated by the tidal force of the GWs. In our detector, three independent signals can be derived from the GW by monitoring multiple rotational degrees of freedom, i.e., the horizontal rotations and vertical rotations of the bars. Since the three outputs have different antenna pattern functions, the multioutput system improves the detection rate and the parameter estimation accuracy. This is useful for obtaining further details about the GW sources, such as population and directions. We successfully operated the multioutput detector continuously for more than 24 hours with stable data quality. The GW equivalent strain noise in one of the signals has been reduced to $1\times {10}^{-10}{\mathrm{Hz}}^{-1/2}$ at 3 Hz by a combination of passive and active vibration isolation systems, while the sensitivities to possible GW signals derived from the vertical rotations are worse than that from the horizontal rotation.

The scattering of dark matter particles off nuclei in direct detection experiments can be described in terms of a multidimensional effective field theory (EFT). A new systematic analysis technique is developed using the EFT approach and Bayesian inference methods to exploit, when possible, the energy-dependent information of the detected events, experimental efficiencies, and backgrounds. Highly dimensional likelihoods are calculated over the mass of the weakly interacting massive particle (WIMP) and multiple EFT coupling coefficients, which can then be used to set limits on these parameters and choose models (EFT operators) that best fit the direct detection data. Expanding the parameter space beyond the standard spin-independent isoscalar cross section and WIMP mass reduces tensions between previously published experiments. Combining these experiments to form a single joint likelihood leads to stronger limits than when each experiment is considered on its own. Simulations using two nonstandard operators (${\mathcal{O}}_3$ and ${\mathcal{O}}_8$) are used to test the proposed analysis technique in up to five dimensions and demonstrate the importance of using multiple likelihood projections when determining constraints on WIMP mass and EFT coupling coefficients. In particular, this shows that an explicit momentum dependence in dark matter scattering can be identified.

The detailed investigation of the Higgs sector at present and future colliders necessitates from the theory side as precise predictions as possible, including higher-order corrections. An important ingredient for the computation of higher-order corrections is the renormalization of the model parameters and fields. In this paper we complete the renormalization of the two-Higgs-doublet model (2HDM) Higgs sector launched in a previous contribution with the investigation of the renormalization of the mixing angles $\alpha$ and $\beta$. Here, we treat the renormalization of the mass parameter $m_{12}^2$ that softly breaks the ${\mathbb{Z}}_2$ symmetry of the 2HDM Higgs sector. We investigate the impact of two different renormalization schemes on the sample Higgs-to-Higgs decay $H\to hh$. This decay also allows us to analyze the renormalization of the mixing angles and to confirm the properties extracted before in other Higgs decays. In conclusion we find that a gauge-independent, process-independent and numerically stable renormalization of the 2HDM Higgs sector is given by the application of the tadpole-pinched scheme for the mixing angles $\alpha$ and $\beta$ and by the use of the modified minimal subtraction scheme for $m_{12}^2$.

We propose a novel method to search for possible new macroscale spin- and/or velocity-dependent forces (SVDFs) based on specially designed ${\mathrm{SmCo}}_5$ spin sources and a spin exchange relaxation-free (SERF) comagnetometer. A simulation shows that, by covering a ${\mathrm{SmCo}}_5$ permanent magnet with a layer of pure iron, a high net spin density source of about $1\times 10^{22}/{\mathrm{cm}}^3$ could be obtained. Taking advantages of the high spin density of this iron-shielded ${\mathrm{SmCo}}_5$ and the high sensitivity of the SERF, the proposed method could set up new limits of greater than 10 orders of magnitude more sensitive than those from previous experiments or proposals in exploring SVDFs in force ranges larger than 1 cm.

We present high-statistics estimates of the isovector charges of the nucleon from four $2+1$-flavor ensembles generated using Wilson-clover fermions with stout smearing and tree-level tadpole improved Symanzik gauge action at lattice spacings $a\approx 0.127$ and 0.09 fm and with $M_{\pi }\approx 280$ and 170 MeV. The truncated solver method with bias correction and the coherent source sequential propagator construction are used to cost-effectively achieve $O(10^5)$ measurements on each ensemble. Using these data, the analysis of two-point correlation functions is extended to include four states in the fits, and of three-point functions to three states. Control over excited-state contamination in the calculation of the nucleon mass, the mass gaps between excited states, and in the matrix elements is demonstrated by the consistency of estimates using this multistate analysis of the spectral decomposition of the correlation functions and from simulations of the three-point functions at multiple values of the source-sink separation. The results for all three charges, $g_A$, $g_S$ and $g_T$, are in good agreement with calculations done using the clover-on-HISQ lattice formulation with similar values of the lattice parameters.

The positive-parity nucleon spectrum is explored in $2+1$ flavor lattice QCD in a search for new low-lying energy eigenstates near the energy regime of the Roper resonance. In addition to conventional three-quark operators, we consider novel, local five-quark meson-baryon type interpolating fields that hold the promise to reveal new eigenstates that may have been missed in previous analyses. Drawing on phenomenological insight, five-quark operators based on $\sigma N$, $\pi N$ and $a_{0}N$ channels are constructed. Spectra are produced in a high-statistics analysis on the PACS-CS dynamical gauge-field configurations with $m_{\pi }=411\mathrm{MeV}$ via variational analyses of several operator combinations. Despite the introduction of qualitatively different interpolating fields, no new states are observed in the energy regime of the Roper resonance. This result provides further evidence that the low-lying finite-volume scattering states are not localized, and strengthens the interpretation of the Roper as a coupled-channel, dynamically-generated meson-baryon resonance.

In this work we study the effects of boundary conditions and gradient flow in $1+1$-dimensional lattice ${\varphi }^4$ theory. Simulations are performed with periodic (PBC) and open (OPEN) boundary conditions in the temporal direction and the lattice fields are then smoothed by applying gradient flow. Our results for observables—such as $⟨|\varphi |⟩$ and the susceptibility—indicate that at a given volume the phase transition point is shifted towards a lower value of the lattice coupling ${\lambda }_0$ for a fixed $m_0^2$ in the case of OPEN compared to PBC, and the shift decreases as the volume increases. We employ the finite-size scaling (FSS) analysis to obtain the true critical behavior, mainly to emphasize the necessity of a FSS formalism incorporating the surface effect in the case of the open boundary. The above features are found to be illuminated more clearly by the application of gradient flow. Finally, we compare and contrast the extraction of the boson mass from the two-point function (PBC) and the one-point function (OPEN) as the coupling (starting from moderate values) approaches the critical value corresponding to the vanishing of the mass gap. In the critical region, finite-volume effects become dominant in the latter. The surface effect seems to result in a less sharp phase transition for OPEN compared to PBC for all observables studied here.

Noncentral collision of heavy ions can generate a large magnetic field in their neighborhood. We describe a method to calculate the effect of this field on the dilepton emission rate from the colliding region, when it reaches thermal equilibrium. It is calculated in the real time method of the thermal field theory. We find that the rate is affected significantly only for lower momenta of dileptons.