In this work we consider the time evolution of charged Rényi entanglement entropies after exciting the vacuum with local fermionic operators. In order to explore the information contained in charged Rényi entropies, we perform computations of their excess due to the operator excitation in two-dimensional conformal field theory, free fermionic field theories in various dimensions as well as holography. In the analysis we focus on the dependence on the entanglement charge, the chemical potential and the spacetime dimension. We find that excesses of charged (Rényi) entanglement entropy can be interpreted in terms of charged quasiparticles. Moreover, we show that by appropriately tuning the chemical potential, charged Rényi entropies can be used to extract entanglement in a certain charge sector of the excited state.

We compute the logarithmic coefficient of the entanglement entropy on a sphere for a Maxwell field in $d=3+1$ dimensions. In spherical coordinates the problem decomposes into one-dimensional ones along the radial coordinate for each angular momentum. We show that the entanglement entropy of a Maxwell field is equivalent to one of two identical massless scalars from which the mode of $l=0$ has been removed. This shows the relation $c_{\log }^M=2(c_{\log }^S-c_{\log }^{S_{l=0}})$ between the logarithmic coefficient in the entropy for a Maxwell field $c_{\log }^M$, the one for a $d=3+1$ massless scalar $c_{\log }^S$, and the logarithmic coefficient $c_{\log }^{S_{l=0}}$ for a $d=1+1$ scalar with a Dirichlet boundary condition at the origin. Using the accepted values for these coefficients $c_{\log }^S=-1/90$ and $c_{\log }^{S_{l=0}}=1/6$, we get $c_{\log }^M=-16/45$, which coincides with Dowker’s calculation, but does not match the coefficient $-\frac{31}{45}$ in the trace anomaly for a Maxwell field. We have numerically evaluated these three numbers $c_{\log }^M$, $c_{\log }^S$ and $c_{\log }^{S_{l=0}}$, verifying the relation, as well as checked that they coincide with the corresponding logarithmic term in mutual information of two concentric spheres.

I revisit cosmological perturbations in Bekenstein’s tensor-vector-scalar theory (TeVeS). Considering only scalar modes in the conformal Newtonian gauge, the extra degrees of freedom are expressed in a way suitable for studying modifications at the level of the metric potentials. Assuming a universe in the matter-dominated phase, I discuss the mechanism responsible for boosting structure growth and confirm the vector field as its key ingredient. Using a semianalytic approach, I further characterize the evolution of density perturbations and the potentials on sub- and superhorizon scales.

The relational framework of canonical quantum gravity with nonultralocal constraints is explored. After demonstrating the absence of anomalies, a spatially discretized version of the relational framework is introduced. This allows the application of Lieb-Robinson bounds to on-shell monotonic gauge flow when there is a continuous external “time” parameter. An explicit Lieb-Robinson bound is derived for the differential on-shell evolution of the operator norm of the commutator of discretized Dirac observables, demonstrating how a local light conelike causal structure emerges. Ultralocal constraints do not permit such a structure to arise via Lieb-Robinson bounds. Gauge and ($3+1$)-diffeomorphism invariance of the light cone is discussed along with the issues of quantum fluctuations, the nature of the nonlocalities, the spatial continuum limit, and the possible links to noncommutative geometry.

Galaxy clusters are the largest gravitationally bound objects in the Universe and may be suitable targets for indirect dark matter searches. With 85 months of Fermi LAT Pass 8 publicly available data, we analyze the gamma-ray emission in the direction of 16 nearby galaxy clusters with an unbinned likelihood analysis. No statistically or globally significant $\gamma \text{−}\mathrm{ray}$ line feature is identified and a tentative line signal may present at $\sim 43\mathrm{GeV}$. The 95% confidence level upper limits on the velocity-averaged cross section of dark matter particles annihilating into double $\gamma$ rays (i.e., $⟨\sigma v{⟩}_{\chi \chi \to \gamma \gamma }$) are derived. Unless very optimistic boost factors of dark matter annihilation in these galaxy clusters have been assumed, such constraints are much weaker than the bounds set by the Galactic $\gamma \text{−}\mathrm{ray}$ data.

Weak lensing (WL) promises to be a particularly sensitive probe of both the growth of large-scale structure as well as the fundamental relation between matter density perturbations and metric perturbations, thus providing a powerful tool with which we may constrain modified theories of gravity (MG) on cosmological scales. Future deep, wide-field WL surveys will provide an unprecedented opportunity to constrain deviations from General Relativity. Employing a 3D analysis based on the spherical Fourier-Bessel expansion, we investigate the extent to which MG theories will be constrained by a typical 3D WL survey configuration including noise from the intrinsic ellipticity distribution ${\sigma }_{\epsilon }$ of source galaxies. Here, we focus on two classes of screened theories of gravity: (i) $f(R)$ chameleon models and (ii) environmentally dependent dilaton models. We use one-loop perturbation theory combined with halo models in order to accurately model the evolution of the matter power spectrum with redshift in these theories. Using a ${\chi }^2$ analysis, we show that for an all-sky spectroscopic survey, the parameter $f_{R_0}$ can be constrained in the range $f_{R_0}<5\times {10}^{-6}(9\times {10}^{-6})$ for $n=1(2)$ with a $3\sigma$ confidence level. This can be achieved by using relatively low-order angular harmonics $\ell <100$. Higher-order harmonics $\ell >100$ could provide tighter constraints but are subject to nonlinear effects, such as baryonic feedback, that must be accounted for. We also employ a Principal Component Analysis in order to study the parameter degeneracies in the MG parameters. The confusion from intrinsic ellipticity correlation and modification of the matter power spectrum at a small scale due to feedback mechanisms is briefly discussed.

We examine whether charged particles injected by self-annihilating dark matter (DM) into regions undergoing diffuse shock acceleration can be accelerated to high energies. We consider three astrophysical sites where shock acceleration is supposed to occur, namely the Galactic center and galaxy cluster mergers. For the Milky Way, we find that the acceleration of cosmic rays injected by dark matter could lead to a bump in the cosmic ray spectrum provided that the product of the efficiency of the acceleration mechanism and the concentration of DM particles is high enough. Within the Galaxy, we find that the Fermi bubbles are a potentially more efficient accelerator than supernovae remnants. However, both could in principle accelerate electrons and protons injected by dark matter to very high energies. At the extragalactic level, the acceleration of dark matter annihilation products could be responsible for enhanced radio emission from colliding clusters.

Excess GeV gamma rays from the Galactic Center (GC) have been measured with the Fermi Large Area Telescope (LAT). The presence of the GC excess (GCE) appears to be robust with respect to changes in the diffuse galactic background modeling. The three main proposals for the GCE are an unresolved population of millisecond pulsars (MSPs), outbursts of cosmic rays from the GC region, and self-annihilating dark matter (DM). The injection of secondary electrons and positrons into the interstellar medium (ISM) by an unresolved population of MSPs or DM annihilations can lead to observable gamma-ray emission via inverse Compton scattering or bremsstrahlung. Here, we investigate how to determine whether secondaries are important in a model for the GCE. We develop a method of testing model fit which accounts for the different spatial morphologies of the secondary emission. We examine several models which give secondary emission and illustrate a case where a broadband analysis is not sufficient to determine the need for secondary emission.

As energetic particles diffuse out of radio and star-forming galaxies (SFGs), their intracluster density builds up to a level that could account for a substantial part or all the emission from a radio halo. We calculate the particle time-dependent, spectro-spatial distributions from a solution of a diffusion equation with radio galaxies as sources of electrons and SFGs as sources of both electrons and protons. Whereas strong radio galaxies are typically found in the cluster (e.g., Coma) core, the fraction of SFGs increases with distance from the cluster center. Scaling particle escape rates from their sources to the reasonably well determined Galactic rates, and for realistic gas density and magnetic field spatial profiles, we find that predicted spectra and spatial profiles of radio emission from primary and secondary electrons are roughly consistent with those deduced from current measurements of the Coma halo (after subtraction of emission from the relic Coma A). Nonthermal x-ray emission is predicted to be mostly by Compton scattering of electrons from radio galaxies off the CMB, whereas $\gamma$-ray emission is primarily from the decay of neutral pions produced in interactions of protons from SFGs with protons in intracluster gas.

We consider the transformation properties of fermions under the discrete symmetries $CPT$, $CP$, and $C$ in the presence of $B-L$ violation. We thus generalize the analysis of the known properties of Majorana neutrinos, probed via neutrinoless double beta decay, to include the case of Dirac fermions with $B-L$ violation, which can be probed via neutron-antineutron oscillations. We show that the resulting $CPT$ phase has implications for the interplay of neutron-antineutron oscillations with external fields and sources and consider the differences in the Majorana dynamics of neutrinos and neutrons in the context of theories with self-conjugate isospin $I=0$ and $I=1/2$ fields.

Models beyond the Standard Model (bSM) often involve elaborate Higgs sectors, which can be a source of $CP$ violation. It brings up the question of recognizing in an efficient way whether a model is $CP$ violating. There is a diffuse belief corroborated by all specific multi-Higgs models considered so far that the issue of explicit $CP$ invariance can be linked to the existence of a basis in which all coefficients are real. Here, we prove that this belief is not justified. We present a $CP$-conserving three-Higgs-doublet model for which no real basis exists. The generalized $CP$ symmetry of this model is of order 4, which leads to the peculiar property of the extra neutral Higgs bosons of being neither $CP$-even nor $CP$-odd but “half-odd” under this symmetry transformation.

In this article, we study spontaneous chiral symmetry breaking for quark matter in the background of static and homogeneous parallel electric field $\mathit{E}$ and magnetic field $\mathit{B}$. We use a Nambu-Jona-Lasinio model with a local kernel interaction to compute the relevant quantities to describe chiral symmetry breaking at a finite temperature for a wide range of $E$ and $B$. We study the effect of this background on the inverse catalysis of chiral symmetry breaking for $E$ and $B$ of the same order of magnitude. We then focus on the effect of the equilibration of chiral density $n_5$, produced dynamically by an axial anomaly on the critical temperature. The equilibration of $n_5$, a consequence of chirality-flipping processes in the thermal bath, allows for the introduction of the chiral chemical potential ${\mu }_5$, which is computed self-consistently as a function of the temperature and field strength by coupling the number equation to the gap equation and solving the two within an expansion in $E/T^2$, $B/T^2$, and ${\mu }_5^2/T^2$. We find that even if chirality is produced and equilibrates within a relaxation time ${\tau }_M$, it does not change drastically the thermodynamics, with particular reference to the inverse catalysis induced by the external fields, as long as the average ${\mu }_5$ at equilibrium is not too large.

We investigate the resummation effects with a jet veto, for $W^{\pm }Z$ and $ZZ$ production at the LHC in soft-collinear effective theory, where the invariant mass distributions and the total cross sections with different jet veto $p_T^{\mathrm{veto}}$ and jet radius $R$ are presented at next-to-next-to-leading-logarithmic order (NNLO). We also compare the $\mathrm{NLO}+\mathrm{NNLL}$ resummation results with powheg+pythia, and the LO mode and NLO mode of madgraph5_amc@nlo+pythia. Our results show that, in general, the jet-veto resummation can increase the jet-veto efficiencies compared with those generators. Finally, we compare the $\mathrm{NLO}+\mathrm{NNLL}$ resummation predictions and the experimental data, and find that our results agree with the CMS data within $2\sigma$ C.L. at $\sqrt{S}=8\mathrm{TeV}$.

We introduce a novel method for computing the ($\mu$, $T$)-dependent pressure in continuum QCD, from which we obtain a complex phase diagram and predictions for thermal properties of the dressed-quark component of the system, providing the in-medium behavior of the related trace anomaly, speed of sound, latent heat, and heat capacity.

We calculate the neutral pion photoproduction on the proton near threshold in covariant baryon chiral perturbation theory, including the $\mathrm{\Delta }(1232)$ resonance as an explicit degree of freedom, up to chiral order $p^{7/2}$ in the $\delta$ counting. We compare our results with recent low-energy data from the Mainz Microtron for angular distributions and photon asymmetries. The convergence of the chiral series of the covariant approach is found to improve substantially with the inclusion of the $\mathrm{\Delta }(1232)$ resonance.

The branching fraction of the decay $B_s^0\to D_s^{(*)+}{D}_s^{(*)-}$ is measured using $pp$ collision data corresponding to an integrated luminosity of $1.0{\mathrm{fb}}^{-1}$, collected using the LHCb detector at a center-of-mass energy of 7 TeV. It is found to be $\mathcal{B}(B_s^0\to D_s^{(*)+}{D}_s^{(*)-})=(3.05\pm 0.10\pm 0.20\pm 0.34)\%$, where the uncertainties are statistical, systematic, and due to the normalization channel, respectively. The branching fractions of the individual decays corresponding to the presence of one or two $D_s^{*\pm }$ are also measured. The individual branching fractions are found to be $\mathcal{B}(B_s^0\to D_s^{*\pm }{D}_s^{\mp })=(1.35\pm 0.06\pm 0.09\pm 0.15)\%$, $\mathcal{B}(B_s^0\to D_s^{*+}{D}_s^{*-})=(1.27\pm 0.08\pm 0.10\pm 0.14)\%$. All three results are the most precise determinations to date.

In this paper, we show that adding to the standard model particle content a set of superstrongly interacting particles with appropriately chosen hypercharges leads to unification of strong and electroweak interactions at a level comparable to that of the minimal supersymmetric standard model.

The purpose of this study is to derive the equation of motion for geodesics in the vicinity of the spacetime of a ($2+1$)-dimensional charged BTZ black hole. In this paper, we solve geodesics for both massive and massless particles in terms of Weierstrass elliptic and Kleinian sigma hyperelliptic functions. Then we determine different trajectories of motion for particles in terms of conserved energy and angular momentum and also with effective potential.

Refined constraints on chameleon theories are calculated for atom-interferometry experiments, using a numerical approach consisting in solving for a four-region model the static and spherically symmetric Klein-Gordon equation for the chameleon field. By modeling not only the test mass and the vacuum chamber but also its walls and the exterior environment, the method allows one to probe new effects on the scalar field profile and the induced acceleration of atoms. In the case of a weakly perturbing test mass, the effect of the wall is to enhance the field profile and to lower the acceleration inside the chamber by up to 1 order of magnitude. In the thin-shell regime, results are found to be in good agreement with the analytical estimations, when measurements are realized in the immediate vicinity of the test mass. Close to the vacuum chamber wall, the acceleration becomes negative and potentially measurable. This prediction could be used to discriminate between fifth-force effects and systematic experimental uncertainties, by doing the experiment at several key positions inside the vacuum chamber. For the chameleon potential $V(\varphi )={\mathrm{\Lambda }}^{4+\alpha }/{\varphi }^{\alpha }$ and a coupling function $A(\varphi )=\exp (\varphi /M)$, one finds $M\gtrsim 7\times {10}^{16}\mathrm{GeV}$, independently of the power-law index. For $V(\varphi )={\mathrm{\Lambda }}^4(1+\mathrm{\Lambda }/\varphi )$, one finds $M\gtrsim {10}^{14}\mathrm{GeV}$. A sensitivity of $a\sim {10}^{-11}\mathrm{m}/{\mathrm{s}}^2$ would probe the model up to the Planck scale. Finally, a proposal for a second experimental setup, in a vacuum room, is presented. In this case, Planckian values of $M$ could be probed provided that $a\sim {10}^{-10}\mathrm{m}/{\mathrm{s}}^2$, a limit reachable by future experiments. Our method can easily be extended to constrain other models with a screening mechanism, such as symmetron, dilaton and f(R) theories.

We test the imprint of $f(R)$ modified gravity on the halo mass function, using N-body simulations and a theoretical model developed in [M. Kopp et al., Phys. Rev. D 88, 084015 (2013)]. We find a good agreement between theory and simulations $\sim 5\%$. We extend the theoretical model to the conditional mass function and apply it to the prediction of the linear halo bias in $f(R)$ gravity. Using the halo model we obtain a prediction for the nonlinear matter power spectrum accurate to $\sim 10\%$ at $z=0$ and up to $k=2\mathrm{h}/\mathrm{Mpc}$. We also study halo profiles for the $f(R)$ models and find a deviation from the standard general relativity (GR) result up to 40%, depending on the halo masses and redshift. This has not been pointed out in previous analysis. Finally we study the number density and profiles of voids identified in these $f(R)$ N-body simulations. We underline the effect of the bias and the sampling to identify voids. We find significant deviation from GR when measuring the $f(R)$ void profiles with $f_{R0}<-10^{-6}$.