We investigate the quantum radiation produced by an Unruh-De Witt detector in a uniformly accelerating motion coupled to the vacuum fluctuations. Quantum radiation is nonvanishing, which is consistent with the previous calculation by Lin and Hu [Phys. Rev. D 73, 124018 (2006)]. We infer that this quantum radiation from the Unruh-De Witt detector is generated by the nonlocal correlation of the Minkowski vacuum state, which has its origin in the entanglement of the state between the left and the right Rindler wedges.

Neutrinos with energies in the PeV to EeV range produce upgoing extensive air showers when they interact underground close enough to the surface of the Earth. We study the possibility for detection of such showers with a system of very wide field-of-view imaging atmospheric Cherenkov telescopes, named CHANT (Cherenkov from astrophysical neutrinos telescope), pointing down to a strip below the Earth’s horizon from space. We find that CHANT provides sufficient sensitivity for the study of the astrophysical neutrino flux in a wide energy range, from 10 PeV to 10 EeV. A space-based CHANT system can discover and study in detail the cosmogenic neutrino flux originating from interactions of ultra-high-energy cosmic rays in the intergalactic medium.

We investigate the implications of a minimal $SU(2)$ gauge symmetry extension of the standard model at the LHC. To achieve the spontaneous symmetry breaking, a heavy Higgs doublet of the $SU(2)$ is introduced. To obtain an anomaly-free model and the decays of new charged gauge bosons, we include a vectorlike quark doublet. We also employ a real scalar boson to dictate the heavy Higgs production via the gluon-gluon fusion processes. We find that the new gauge coupling and the masses of new gauge bosons can be strictly bounded by the electroweak $\rho$-parameter and dilepton resonance experiments at the LHC. We find that due to the new charged gauge boson enhancement, the cross sections for a heavy scalar boson to diphoton channel measured by ATLAS and CMS can be easily satisfied when the values of Yukawa couplings are properly taken. Furthermore, by adopting event simulation, we find that the significance of $pp\to (\gamma \gamma {)}_H+\mathrm{jet}$, where the diphoton is from the heavy Higgs decay, can be over $4\sigma$ when the luminosity is above $60{\mathrm{fb}}^{-1}$.

The existence of tiny neutrino masses at a scale more than a million times smaller than the lightest charged fermion mass, namely the electron, and their mixings cannot be explained within the framework of the exceptionally successful standard model (SM). Several mechanisms were proposed to explain the tiny neutrino masses, most prominent among which is the so-called seesaw mechanism. Many models were built around this concept, one of which is the electroweak (EW)-scale ${\nu }_R$ model. In this model, right-handed neutrinos are fertile and their masses are connected to the electroweak scale ${\mathrm{\Lambda }}_{\mathrm{EW}}\sim 246\mathrm{GeV}$. It is these two features that make the search for right-handed neutrinos at colliders such as the LHC feasible. The EW-scale ${\nu }_R$ model has new quarks and leptons of opposite chirality at the electroweak scale [for the same SM gauge symmetry $SU(2{)}_W\times U(1{)}_Y$] compared to what we have for the standard model. With suitable modification of the Higgs sector, the EW-scale ${\nu }_R$ model satisfies the electroweak precision test and, also the constraints coming from the observed 125-GeV Higgs scalar. Since in this model, the mirror fermions are required to be in the EW scale, these can be produced at the LHC giving final states with a very low background from the SM. One such final state is the same sign dileptons with large missing $p_T$ for the events. In this work, we explore the constraint provided by the 8 TeV data, and prospect of observing this signal in the 13 TeV runs at the LHC. Additional signals will be the presence of displaced vertices depending on the smallness of the Yukawa couplings of the mirror leptons with the ordinary leptons and the singlet Higgs present in the model. Of particular importance to the EW-scale ${\nu }_R$ model is the production of ${\nu }_R$ which will be a direct test of the seesaw mechanism at collider energies.

Supersymmetric extensions of the standard model contain additional heavy neutral Higgs bosons that are coupled to heavy scalar top quarks (stops). This system exhibits interesting field theoretic phenomena when the Higgs mass is close to the stop-antistop production threshold. Existing work in the literature has examined the digluon-to-diphoton cross section near threshold and has focused on enhancements in the cross section that might arise either from the perturbative contributions to the Higgs-to-digluon and Higgs-to-diphoton form factors or from mixing of the Higgs boson with stoponium states. Near threshold, enhancements in the relevant amplitudes that go as inverse powers of the stop-antistop relative velocity require resummations of perturbation theory and/or nonperturbative treatments. We present a complete formulation of threshold effects at leading order in the stop-antistop relative velocity in terms of nonrelativistic effective field theory. We give detailed numerical calculations for the case in which the stop-antistop Green’s function is modeled with a Coulomb-Schrödinger Green’s function. We find several general effects that do not appear in a purely perturbative treatment. Higgs-stop-antistop mixing effects displace physical masses from the threshold region, thereby rendering the perturbative threshold enhancements inoperative. In the case of large Higgs-stop-antistop couplings, the displacement of a physical state above threshold substantially increases its width, owing to its decay width to a stop-antistop pair, and greatly reduces its contribution to the cross section.

We study the polarized quark hadronization in a Monte Carlo (MC) framework based on the recent extension of the quark-jet framework, where a self-consistent treatment of the quark polarization transfer in a sequential hadronization picture has been presented. Here, we first adopt this approach for MC simulations of the hadronization process with a finite number of produced hadrons, expressing the relevant probabilities in terms of the eight leading twist quark-to-quark transverse-momentum-dependent (TMD) splitting functions (SFs) for elementary $q\to q^{\prime }+h$ transition. We present explicit expressions for the unpolarized and Collins fragmentation functions (FFs) of unpolarized hadrons emitted at rank 2. Further, we demonstrate that all the current spectator-type model calculations of the leading twist quark-to-quark TMD SFs violate the positivity constraints, and we propose a quark model based ansatz for these input functions that circumvents the problem. We validate our MC framework by explicitly proving the absence of unphysical azimuthal modulations of the computed polarized FFs, and by precisely reproducing the earlier derived explicit results for rank-2 pions. Finally, we present the full results for pion unpolarized and Collins FFs, as well as the corresponding analyzing powers from high statistics MC simulations with a large number of produced hadrons for two different model input elementary SFs. The results for both sets of input functions exhibit the same general features of an opposite signed Collins function for favored and unfavored channels at large $z$ and, at the same time, demonstrate the flexibility of the quark-jet framework by producing significantly different dependences of the results at mid to low $z$ for the two model inputs.

We investigate the role driven by the scalar meson $\sigma$ exchange in the photoproduction of the vector meson $\varphi (1020)$ off a proton by using a Reggeized model. Based on the ${\pi }^0(135)+\sigma (500)+f_2(1270)+\mathrm{Pomeron}$ exchanges, we demonstrate that the $\sigma$ exchange plays the role to reproduce the bump structure at the forward angle in the differential cross section as well as the peaking behavior in the total cross section observed in the CLAS Collaboration. We also discuss the possible observation of the scaled cross section $s^{7}d\sigma /dt$ at the production angle $\theta =90°$ from the CLAS data. It is found that the axial vector meson $f_1(1285)$ exchange with the trajectory ${\alpha }_{f_1}(t)=0.028t+0.9\pm 0.2$ arising from the axial anomaly of the QCD vacuum plays the role to clarify the scaling up to 5 GeV.

In the context of Lorentz-Finsler spacetime theories the relativity principle holds at a spacetime point if the indicatrix (observer space) is homogeneous. We point out that in four spacetime dimensions there are just three kinematical models which respect an exact form of the relativity principle and for which all observers agree on the spacetime volume. They have necessarily affine sphere indicatrices. For them every observer which looks at a flash of light emitted by a point would observe, respectively, an expanding (a) sphere, (b) tetrahedron, or (c) cone, with barycenter at the point. The first model corresponds to Lorentzian relativity, the second one has been studied by several authors though the relationship with affine spheres passed unnoticed, and the last one has not been previously recognized and it is studied here in some detail. The symmetry groups are $O^{+}(3,1),{\mathbb{R}}^3,O^{+}(2,1)\times \mathbb{R}$, respectively. In the second part, devoted to the general relativistic theory, we show that the field equations can be obtained by gauging the Finsler Lagrangian symmetry while avoiding direct use of Finslerian curvatures. We construct some notable affine sphere spacetimes which in the appropriate velocity limit return the Schwarzschild, Kerr-Schild, Kerr–de Sitter, Kerr-Newman, Taub, and Friedmann-Lemaître-Robertson-Walker spacetimes, respectively.

This work presents an analysis of monoenergetic electronic recoil peaks in the dark-matter-search and calibration data from the first underground science run of the Large Underground Xenon (LUX) detector. Liquid xenon charge and light yields for electronic recoil energies between 5.2 and 661.7 keV are measured, as well as the energy resolution for the LUX detector at those same energies. Additionally, there is an interpretation of existing measurements and descriptions of electron-ion recombination fluctuations in liquid xenon as limiting cases of a more general liquid xenon recombination fluctuation model. Measurements of the standard deviation of these fluctuations at monoenergetic electronic recoil peaks exhibit a linear dependence on the number of ions for energy deposits up to 661.7 keV, consistent with previous LUX measurements between 2 and 16 keV with ${}^3\mathrm{H}$. We highlight similarities in liquid xenon recombination for electronic and nuclear recoils with a comparison of recombination fluctuations measured with low-energy calibration data.

The weak gravity conjecture (WGC) is a proposed constraint on theories with gauge fields and gravity, requiring the existence of light charged particles and/or imposing an upper bound on the field theory cutoff $\mathrm{\Lambda }$. If taken as a consistency requirement for effective field theories (EFTs), it rules out possibilities for model building including some models of inflation. I demonstrate simple models which satisfy all forms of the WGC, but which through Higgsing of the original gauge fields produce low-energy EFTs with gauge forces that badly violate the WGC. These models illustrate specific loopholes in arguments that motivate the WGC from a bottom-up perspective; for example the arguments based on magnetic monopoles are evaded when the magnetic confinement that occurs in a Higgs phase is accounted for. This indicates that the WGC should not be taken as a veto on EFTs, even if it turns out to be a robust property of UV quantum gravity theories. However, if the latter is true, then parametric violation of the WGC at low energy comes at the cost of nonminimal field content in the UV. I propose that only a very weak constraint is applicable to EFTs, $\mathrm{\Lambda }\lesssim (\log \frac{1}{g}{)}^{-1/2}{M}_{\mathrm{pl}}$, where $g$ is the gauge coupling, motivated by entropy bounds. Remarkably, EFTs produced by Higgsing a theory that satisfies the WGC can saturate but not violate this bound.

Recently, evidence was provided for the existence of an $a$-function for renormalizable quantum field theories in three dimensions. An explicit expression was given at lowest order for general theories involving scalars and fermions and shown to be related to the $\beta$-functions by a gradient flow equation with positive-definite metric as in four dimensions. Here, we extend this lowest-order calculation to a general Abelian Chern-Simons gauge theory coupled to fermions and scalars and derive a prediction for part of the four-loop Yukawa $\beta$-function. We also compute the complete four-loop Yukawa $\beta$-function for the scalar-fermion theory and show that it is entirely consistent with the gradient flow equations at next-to-leading order.

Usually, we assume that there is no inhomogeneity isotropic in terms of our location in our Universe. This assumption has not been observationally confirmed yet in sufficient accuracy, and we need to consider the possibility that there are non-negligible large-scale isotropic inhomogeneities in our Universe. The existence of large-scale isotropic inhomogeneities affects the determination of cosmological parameters. In particular, from only the distance-redshift relation, we cannot distinguish the inhomogeneous isotropic universe model from the homogeneous isotropic one, because of the ambiguity in the cosmological parameters. In this paper, in order to avoid such ambiguity, we consider three observables—the distance-redshift relation, the fluctuation spectrum of the cosmic microwave background radiation, and the scale of the baryon acoustic oscillation—and compare these observables in two universe models. One is the inhomogeneous isotropic universe model with the cosmological constant, and the other is the homogeneous isotropic universe model with dark energy other than the cosmological constant. We show that these two universe models cannot predict the same observational data of all three observables but the same ones of only two of three, as long as the perturbations are adiabatic. In principle, we can distinguish the inhomogeneous isotropic universe from the homogeneous isotropic one through the appropriate three observables, if the perturbations are adiabatic.

Proposed dark matter detectors with eV-scale sensitivities will detect a large background of atomic (nuclear) recoils from coherent photon scattering of MeV-scale photons. This background climbs steeply below $\sim 10\mathrm{eV}$, far exceeding the declining rate of low-energy Compton recoils. The upcoming generation of dark matter detectors will not be limited by this background, but further development of eV-scale and sub-eV detectors will require strategies, including the use of low nuclear mass target materials, to maximize dark matter sensitivity while minimizing the coherent photon scattering background.

Machine learning methods incorporating deep neural networks have been the subject of recent proposals for new hadronic resonance taggers. These methods require training on a data set produced by an event generator where the true class labels are known. However, this may bias the network towards learning features associated with the approximations to QCD used in that generator which are not present in real data. We therefore investigate the effects of variations in the modeling of the parton shower on the performance of deep neural network taggers using jet images from hadronic $W$ bosons at the LHC, including detector-related effects. By investigating network performance on samples from the Pythia, Herwig and Sherpa generators, we find differences of up to 50% in background rejection for fixed signal efficiency. We also introduce and study a method, which we dub zooming, for implementing scale invariance in neural-network-based taggers. We find that this leads to an improvement in performance across a wide range of jet transverse momenta. Our results emphasize the importance of gaining a detailed understanding of what aspects of jet physics these methods are exploiting.

Cross sections for the charm-production reactions $\overline{p}p\to {\overline{\mathrm{\Lambda }}}_c^{-}{\mathrm{\Sigma }}_c^{+}$, ${\overline{\mathrm{\Sigma }}}_c{\mathrm{\Sigma }}_c$, ${\overline{\mathrm{\Xi }}}_c{\mathrm{\Xi }}_c$, and ${\overline{\mathrm{\Xi }}}_c^{\prime }{\mathrm{\Xi }}_c^{\prime }$ are presented, for energies near their respective thresholds. The results are based on a calculation performed in the meson-exchange framework in close analogy to earlier studies of the Jülich group on the strangeness-production reactions $\overline{p}p\to \overline{\mathrm{\Lambda }}\mathrm{\Sigma }$, $\overline{\mathrm{\Sigma }}\mathrm{\Sigma }$, $\overline{\mathrm{\Xi }}\mathrm{\Xi }$ by connecting the two sectors via SU(4) flavor symmetry. The cross sections are found to be in the order of $0.1–1\mu \mathrm{b}$ at energies of 100 MeV above the respective thresholds, for all considered channels. Complementary to meson exchange, where the charmed baryons are produced by the exchange of $D$ and $D^{*}$ mesons, a charm-production potential derived in a quark model is employed for assessing uncertainties. The cross sections predicted within that picture turn out to be significantly smaller.

We investigate whether the beta function of the finite-$N$ Gross-Neveu model, as calculated up to the four-loop level, exhibits evidence for an infrared zero. As part of our analysis, we calculate and analyze Padé approximants to this beta function and evaluate effects of scheme dependence. From our study, we find that in the range of coupling where the perturbative calculation of the four-loop beta function is reliable, it does not exhibit robust evidence for an infrared zero.

Huge electromagnetic fields are known to be present during the late stages of the dynamics of supernovae. Thus, when dealing with electrodynamics in this context, the possibility may arise to probe nonlinear theories (generalizations of the Maxwellian electromagnetism). We firstly solve Einstein field equations minimally coupled to an arbitrary (current-free) nonlinear Lagrangian of electrodynamics (NLED) in the slow rotation regime $a\ll M$ (black hole’s mass), up to first order in $a/M$. We then make use of the robust and self-contained Born-Infeld Lagrangian in order to compare and contrast the physical properties of such NLED spacetime with its Maxwellian counterpart (a slowly rotating Kerr-Newman spacetime), especially focusing on the astrophysics of both neutrino flavor oscillations (${\nu }_e\to {\nu }_{\mu }$, ${\nu }_{\tau }$) and spin-flip (${\nu }_l\to {\nu }_r$, “$l$” stands for “left” and “$r$” stands for “right”, change of neutrino handedness) mass level crossings, the equivalent to gyroscopic precessions. Such analysis proves that in the spacetime of a slowly rotating nonlinear charged black hole (RNCBH), intrinsically associated with the assumption the electromagnetism is nonlinear, the neutrino dynamics in core-collapse supernovae could be significantly changed. In such an astrophysical environment, a positive enhancement (reduction of the electron fraction $Y_e<0.5$) of the r-process may take place. Consequently, it might result in hyperluminous supernova explosions due to enlargement, in atomic number and amount, of the decaying nuclides. Finally, we envisage some physical scenarios that may lead to short-lived charged black holes with high charge-to-mass ratios (associated with unstable highly magnetized neutron stars) and ways to possibly disentangle theories of the electromagnetism from other black hole observables (by means of light polarization measurements).

We consider $P({\varphi }^I,X^{IJ})$ theories of multifield inflation and ask the question of how to define the adiabatic and entropy perturbations, widely used in calculating the curvature and isocurvature power spectra, in this general context. It is found that when the field perturbations propagate with different speeds, these adiabatic and entropy modes are not generally the fundamental (most natural to canonically quantize) degrees of freedom that propagate with a single speed. The alternative fields which do propagate with a single speed are found to be a rotation in field space of the adiabatic and entropy perturbations. We show how this affects the form of the horizon-crossing power spectrum, when there is not a single “adiabatic sound speed” sourcing the curvature perturbation. Special cases of our results are discussed, including $P(X)$ theories where the adiabatic and entropy perturbations are fundamental. We finally look at physical motivations for considering multispeed models of inflation, particularly showing that disformal couplings can naturally lead to the kind of kinetic interactions which cause fields to have different sound speeds.

The spatially closed Friedmann-Lemaître-Robertson-Walker model in loop quantum cosmology admits two inequivalent consistent quantizations: one based on expressing the field strength in terms of the holonomies over closed loops and another using a connection operator and open holonomies. Using the effective dynamics, we investigate the phenomenological differences between the two quantizations for the single-fluid and the two-fluid scenarios with various equations of state, including the phantom matter. We show that a striking difference between the two quantizations is the existence of two distinct quantum turnarounds, either bounces or recollapses, in the connection quantization, in contrast to a single distinct quantum bounce or a recollapse in the holonomy quantization. These results generalize an earlier result on the existence of two distinct quantum bounces for stiff matter by Corichi and Karami. However, we find that in certain situations two distinct quantum turnarounds can become virtually indistinguishable. And depending on the initial conditions, a pure quantum cyclic universe can also exist undergoing a quantum bounce and a quantum recollapse. We show that for various equations of states, connection-based quantization leads to super-Planckian values of the energy density and the expansion scalar at quantum turnarounds. Interestingly, we find that very extreme energy densities can also occur for the holonomy quantization, breaching the maximum allowed density in the spatially flat loop quantized model. However, the expansion scalar in all these cases is bounded by a universal value.

The long-standing problem of whether the cosmological constant affects directly the deflection of light caused by a gravitational lens is reconsidered. We use a new approach based on the Hawking quasilocal mass of a sphere grazed by light rays and on its splitting into local and cosmological parts. Previous literature restricted to the cosmological constant is extended to any form of dark energy accelerating the universe in which the gravitational lens is embedded.