Composite asymmetric dark matter (ADM) models provide a well-motivated paradigm that simultaneously explains dark matter (DM) relic density and matter-antimatter asymmetry. In these models, the mass of the DM candidate (the lightest dark baryon) is generated through the dark confinement scale dynamics. Although the leptophilic composite ADM model offers a viable framework, comprehensive studies of its collider phenomenology are absent. This work systematically explores novel signatures from the leptophilic composite asymmetric dark sector at both low-energy and high-energy $e^{+}{e}^{-}$ colliders as well as other existing collider constraints. We demonstrate detectability of TeV-scale mediators along with sub-GeV to GeV-scale lightest dark mesons at Belle II and its proposed far detector, GAZELLE, as well as Circular Electron Positron Collider/Future Circular Collider-electron-positron experiments. Moreover, these experiments exhibit complementary coverage of the model parameter space.

Leptogenesis via axion oscillation after inflation is an alternate mechanism of thermal leptogenesis. In this mechanism, the requirement of the existence of a lepton number ($L$) violating process in equilibrium to drive the lepton number requires the temperature of leptogenesis to be at $\sim {10}^{13}\mathrm{GeV}$. Triplet scalars, due to their interaction with gauge bosons, make a suitable candidate to prevail in the thermal bath via gauge scattering at such a high energy. Also, owing to its interaction with Standard Model (SM) leptons and the Higgs scalar, it can mediate the $\mathrm{\Delta }L=2$ process. Moreover, just one triplet is enough to serve the purpose as opposed to thermal leptogenesis where at least one more triplet scalar/right-handed neutrino is required to generate a sizable $CP$ violation. In this work, we study a model where the SM gauge group is extended with $U(1{)}_{\mathrm{PQ}}$, with the addition of one Higgs doublet, one scalar triplet, and one complex scalar singlet. The presence of a complex scalar singlet decouples the Peccei-Quinn (PQ) symmetry breaking from the electroweak scale. It also provides a common source of an axionlike particle and seesaw scale. The scalar triplet offers a common link between leptogenesis via axion oscillation and neutrino mass. Further, with the presence of one triplet scalar, the lepton flavor violation process is directly determined from low-energy neutrino oscillation data.

In this work, we calculate the production cross sections of the 1S and 1P states of the $B_c$ meson for proton-nucleus and nucleus-nucleus colliding beam experiments at LHC and RHIC. We provide estimates for the Au nucleus at RHIC energies and for the Pb and Xe nuclei at LHC energies. Previous estimates of these cross sections have ignored quark antiquark annihilation diagrams and are confined to S states for Pb and Au nuclei. The cross sections of the P states are also equally important as these states lie below the BD threshold and cascade into $B_c$ ground states with 100% probability. In addition to calculating the $p_T$, rapidity, and pseudorapidity distributions of the cross sections, we also determine the nuclear modification factors $R_{pA}$ and $R_{AA}$ for $A=\mathrm{Pb}$, Xe, and Au. The results provide a baseline for the upcoming experimental studies of $B_c$ mesons in pp, pA, and AA collisions in RUN III of LHC and could help develop experimental strategies for identification of hitherto undiscovered states of the $B_c$ meson.

We calculate the Casimir energy for the configuration of two parallel plates coupled to non-Abelian gauge fields with a Yang-Mills action. We consider both $2+1$ and $3+1$ dimensions in the manifestly gauge-invariant formalism we have pursued over the last several years which allows us to factor out the gauge degrees of freedom. A boundary action in the functional integral, equivalent to the insertion of operators representing the plates, is used to enforce the required boundary conditions for the gauge fields. The result is for a kinematic regime corresponding to the exchange of gluons with a dynamically generated mass. We find good agreement in $2+1$ dimensions and reasonable agreement in $3+1$ dimensions with lattice-based numerical evaluations.

A recent study shows that incorporating a new term into the thermodynamic potential density, as required by the thermodynamic consistency criterion, can effectively resolve the thermodynamic inconsistency problems of the conventional perturbative QCD model. This additional term plays a crucial role in resolving inconsistencies at relatively low densities and becomes negligible at extremely high densities. Within this revised perturbative QCD model, we find that if we require only that the energy per baryon of up-down ($ud$) quark matter exceeds 930 MeV so as not to contradict the standard nuclear physics, the maximum mass of an $ud$ quark star allowed by the revised perturbative QCD model can reach up to $2.17M_{\odot }$. From this perspective, the observed $2.14M_{\odot }$ pulsar PSR $\mathrm{J}0740+6620$ may be an $ud$ quark star. However, if we further impose the constraint that the tidal deformability of a $1.4M_{\odot }$ $ud$ quark star must be consistent with the GW170817 event, the maximum mass allowed by the revised perturbative QCD model would decrease to no more than $2.08M_{\odot }$. Consequently, our results suggest that the compact object with a mass of $2.50-2.67M_{\odot }$, as observed in the GW190814 event, cannot be an $ud$ quark star, according to the revised perturbative QCD model.

We conduct a comprehensive study of the semileptonic decay process $\mathrm{\Lambda }\to p\ell {\overline{\nu }}_{\ell }$, focusing on the determination of all six vector and axial-vector form factors that govern the low-energy hadronic matrix elements of the underlying theory. These invariant form factors constitute the essential inputs for describing the decay, and their dependence on the momentum transfer $q^2$ is analyzed across the entire physical kinematic region. To parametrize the $q^2$ dependence, we adopt both the $z$-expansion formalism and a polynomial fitting approach. Utilizing these parametrizations, we compute the exclusive decay widths for both the electron and muon channels and subsequently extract the corresponding branching ratios. Furthermore, we evaluate the ratio of decay widths between the muon and electron channels defined as $R^{\mu e}\equiv \frac{\mathrm{\Gamma }(\mathrm{\Lambda }\to p\mu {\overline{\nu }}_{\mu })}{\mathrm{\Gamma }(\mathrm{\Lambda }\to pe{\overline{\nu }}_e)}$ obtaining $R^{\mu e}=0.196_{-0.012}^{+0.009}$ from the polynomial fit and $R^{\mu e}=0.174_{-0.005}^{+0.002}$ from the $z$ expansion. While both ratios are compatible with previously reported values in the literature, the result from the $z$ expansion exhibits particularly strong agreement with the averages reported by the Particle Data Group.

We study the dependence of neutrino-induced $\gamma /{\pi }^0$ production ($\stackrel{(-)}{{\nu }_{\mu }}+A\to \stackrel{(-)}{{\nu }_{\mu }}(\mu )+\gamma /{\pi }^0+X$) on the target nucleus $A$, in the $\mathrm{\Delta }$ resonance mass region. Our conclusion is based on experimental data for ${\pi }^0$ production rates at photon-nucleus interactions from the A2 Collaboration at the Mainz MAMI accelerator. We assume that $\mathrm{\Delta }$ resonance decays are independent of the production mechanism (via photon, Z, or W boson). In neutral current (NC) interactions, the $1{\pi }^0+X$ production scales as $A^{2/3}$. In contrast, photons from $\mathrm{\Delta }$ decays typically escape the nucleus, resulting in a cross-section proportional to the atomic number $A$. Thus, in NC interactions, the ratio of $\gamma$ production to ${\pi }^0$ production is proportional to $A^{1/3}$. In charged current (CC) ${\nu }_{\mu }\text{−}$ (${\overline{\nu }}_{\mu }$)-induced production of ${\mathrm{\Delta }}^{+}$ (${\mathrm{\Delta }}^0$) will be proportional to the number of neutrons (protons) in the nucleus. After $\mathrm{\Delta }$ decay, due to the charge universality in strong interactions, the suppression factor for ${\pi }^0$ escaping the nucleus must also follow $A^{-1/3}$, as in NC interactions. We predict the ratio of the $\gamma /{\pi }^0$ production rates in NC and CC interactions and for ${\nu }_{\mu }$ and ${\overline{\nu }}_{\mu }$ beams: argon target, $\sim 3.1\%$ (NC/CC ${\nu }_{\mu }/{\overline{\nu }}_{\mu }$); water target, $\sim 1.9\%$ (NC), $\sim 2.3\%$ (CC ${\nu }_{\mu }$), and $\sim 1.7\%$ (CC ${\overline{\nu }}_{\mu }$); liquid scintillator target: $\sim 1.7\%$ (NC), $\sim 2.1\%$ (CC ${\nu }_{\mu }$), and $\sim 1.6\%$ (CC ${\overline{\nu }}_{\mu }$). The accuracy of our predictions is limited due to uncertainties in the decay rate ${\mathrm{\Delta }}^{+/0}\to p/n+\gamma$ and the presence of other (minor) channels of neutrino-induced $\gamma /{\pi }^0$ production in the $\mathrm{\Delta }$ mass region. We also discuss solving the MiniBooNE anomaly by looking at the CC single-photon and single-neutral-pion production rates at the short baseline neutrino program experiments at Fermilab.

A simple effective model for the intermediate-density regime is constructed from the high-density effective theory of quantum chromodynamics (QCD). In the effective model, under a renormalization group (RG) scaling toward low momenta, the original QCD interactions lead to four-quark contact interactions for the relevant quark and hole modes around the Fermi surface. The contact interaction in the scalar channel can be traced back to zero-sound-type collinear quark scattering near the Fermi surface in an instanton background. The quark and hole states in opposite directions of a given Fermi velocity form the collective scalar bosonic mode $\sigma$. The magnitude of $\sigma$ is investigated via the nonperturbative functional renormalization group evolution of the effective average action from the ultraviolet to the infrared (IR). In the mean-background-field approximation for $\sigma$, nontrivial minima ($\overline{\sigma }\ne 0$) are found in the IR limit of the effective average action. A nonvanishing $\overline{\sigma }$ corresponds to condensation of quark and hole states in opposite directions of a given Fermi velocity, in a thin shell-like structure in momentum space around the Fermi surface. This looks similar to the shell-like baryon distribution in momentum space assumed in the quarkyonic-matter concept. However, when including a dynamic bosonic $\sigma$ mode in the RG flow, we find that its diffusive nature destroys the quark-hole condensate, i.e., the IR potential does not show any minima beyond the trivial one.

We perform a phenomenological study of helicity-dependent parton distribution functions (PDFs) using small-$x$ helicity evolution equations, incorporating for the first time single-inclusive jet production data in polarized proton-proton ($pp$) scattering at parton momentum fractions $x<0.1$. We also simultaneously include double-longitudinal spin asymmetries in inclusive and semi-inclusive deep-inelastic scattering probing $x<0.1$. Employing the polarized small-$x$ pure-glue calculation of $pp\to gX$ for the jet production cross section, we modify the large-$N_c\&N_f$ KPS-CTT evolution equations by setting $N_f=0$ to replicate the large-$N_c$ (pure-glue) limit, while retaining external quark flavors for the spinor field operators. We find that the $pp$ data have a considerable impact on the helicity PDFs at small $x$, reducing their uncertainties and leading to a total quark and gluon helicity in the proton for $x<0.1$ of $-0.04\pm 0.23$. Combining our analysis with a recent JAM helicity PDF analysis of the world polarized data, which includes $x>0.1$, we find a total quark and gluon helicity contribution for $x>{10}^{-7}$ of between 0.02 and 0.51.

The reduced cross sections of the semiexclusive $(l,l^{\prime }p)$ lepton scattering process can be identified with distorted spectral functions. Irrespective of the type of interaction, the distorted spectral function is determined mainly by intrinsic properties of the target and the ejected nucleon interaction with residual nucleus. Thus, the reduced cross sections of the neutrino and electron scattering on nuclei as functions of nucleon missing momentum and energy are similar up to Coulomb corrections. Here, we demonstrate the utility of this approach by benchmarking the GENIE neutrino event generator against a broad set of semiexclusive electron scattering data for carbon target. We observe persistent disagreements between the generator predictions and data in the range of nucleon missing momenta less than $80\mathrm{MeV}/\mathrm{c}$. The approach presented in this paper provides a great opportunity to test better the accuracy of nuclear models of quasielastic neutrino-nucleus scattering, employed in neutrino event generators.

Heavy-flavor quarks produced in proton-proton (pp) collisions provide a unique opportunity to investigate the evolution of quark-initiated parton showers from initial hard scatterings to final-state hadrons. By examining jets that contain heavy-flavor hadrons, this study explores the effects of both perturbative and nonperturbative QCD on jet formation and structure. The angular differences between various jet axes, $\mathrm{\Delta }{R}_{\mathrm{axis}}$, offer insight into the radiation patterns and fragmentation of charm quarks. The first measurement of $D^0$-tagged jet axes differences in pp collisions at $\sqrt{s}=5.02\mathrm{TeV}$ by the ALICE experiment at the LHC is presented for jets with transverse momentum $p_{\mathrm{T}}^{\text{ch jet}}\ge 10\mathrm{GeV}/c$ and $D^0$ mesons with $p_{\mathrm{T}}^{{\mathrm{D}}^0}\ge 5\mathrm{GeV}/c$. In this $D^0$-meson-tagged jet measurement, three jet axis definitions, each with different sensitivities to soft, wide-angle radiation, are used: the standard axis, soft drop groomed axis, and winner-takes-all axis. Measurements of the radial distributions of $D^0$ mesons with respect to the jet axes, $\mathrm{\Delta }{R}_{\mathrm{axis}\text{−}{\mathrm{D}}^0}$, are reported, along with the angle, $\mathrm{\Delta }{R}_{\mathrm{axis}}$, between the three jet axes. The $D^0$ meson emerges as the leading particle in these jets, closely aligning with the winner-takes-all axis and diverging from the standard jet axis. The results also examine how varying the sensitivity to soft radiation with grooming influences the orientation of the soft drop jet axis and uncover that charm-jet structure is more likely to survive grooming when the soft drop axis is further from the $D^0$ direction, providing further evidence of the dead-cone effect recently measured by ALICE.

We show that the self-interactions present in the effective field theory formulation of general relativity can couple gravitational wave modes and generate nonclassical states. The output of gravitational nonlinear processes can also be sensitive to quantum features of the input states, indicating that nonlinearities can act both as sources and detectors of quantum features of gravitational waves. Due to gauge and quantization issues in strongly curved spacetimes, we work in the geometric optics limit of gravitational radiation, but we expect that the key ideas extend to situations of astrophysical interest. This offers a new direction for probing the quantum nature of gravity, analogous to how the quantumness of electrodynamics was established through quantum optics.

We show that the axial current density is the physical origin (generator) of quantum intrinsic orbital angular momentum (IOAM). Without the axial current, the IOAM of particles vanishes. Broadly speaking, we argue that the spiral or interference characteristics of the axial current density determine the occurrence of nonlinear or tunneling effects in any spacetime-dependent quantum systems. Our findings offer a comprehensive theoretical framework that addresses the limitations of Keldysh’s ionization theory and provides new insights into the angular momentum properties of quantum systems, particularly in tunneling-dominated regimes. Using Wigner function methods, fermionic generalized two-level model, and Berry phase simulations, we predict that IOAM effect can persist even in pure quantum tunneling processes. These results open the door for experimental verification of IOAM effects in future high-intensity quantum electrodynamics experiments, such as those using x-ray free electron lasers.

We explore the symmetry-broken phase of the self-dual (chiral) sector of higher-spin theory in four dimensions. To that end, we construct a two-parameter vacuum that breaks the anti–de Sitter (AdS) symmetry but remains symmetric under the leftover Poincaré algebra in three dimensions. The vacuum nonzero fields include spin-two AdS frame fields and a scalar, which has a profile that extends along the AdS radial direction. The two free parameters correspond to two scalar branches of conformal dimensions $\mathrm{\Delta }=1$ and $\mathrm{\Delta }=2$. Focusing on the $\mathrm{\Delta }=1$ branch, we analyze the dynamics of free fields around this vacuum and examine its holographic dual. We observe that certain higher spin states decouple in the broken phase. This is illustrated by a set of gauge fluctuations, which acquire no source from higher-spin currents, leading to their complete decoupling, except for the gauge field associated with spin one. The dual higher-spin currents appear to be disentangled from the gauge fields and generally do not conserve; however, their lower-spin components with helicities $s=-1$, 0, and $\pm 1/2$ remain unaffected by the symmetry breaking. Notably, the helicity $s=+1$ current, while deformed, remains conserved.

We define entropic marginally outer trapped surfaces (E-MOTSs), associated with a given entropy density, as a generalization of apparent horizons. We then show that, under first-order perturbations around a stationary black hole, the dynamical black hole entropy proposed by Hollands et al., defined on a background Killing horizon, can be expressed as the Wall entropy evaluated on an E-MOTS associated with it in any diffeomorphism invariant theory of gravity. Our result ensures that the Hollands-Wald-Zhang entropy reduces to the standard Wald entropy in each stationary regime of a dynamical black hole, thereby reinforcing the robustness of the dynamical entropy formulation.

We investigate the electromagnetic radiation emitted by a charged particle orbiting a four-dimensional Schwarzschild–de Sitter black hole using a semiclassical approach. We calculate the probability amplitude for the charged particle to emit a photon, from which we derive the emitted power and spectral distributions. The results are compared with those obtained for scalar fields, considering both minimal and nonminimal coupling, as well as the corresponding electromagnetic case in the Schwarzschild spacetime. It is found that the total electromagnetic power is approximately twice that of the scalar field with conformal coupling for orbits with low angular velocity, similar to the Schwarzschild case, whereas for minimal coupling, the scalar power can even exceed the electromagnetic power. We also investigate the spectral distributions and possible synchrotron emission by orbits near the photon sphere. The electromagnetic case has a much broader frequency spectrum, with a non-negligible lower multipole contribution.

The detection of gravitational waves from binary black hole sources has opened the possibility to search for electric charges and “dark” charges on black holes, the latter being candidates for dark matter. This requires theoretical predictions about the effects of these charges on the inspiral of binary black holes in order to place constraints on them. The effects of these charges on the inspiral can be described using Einstein-Maxwell theory. These effects have previously been derived up to the first post-Newtonian (1PN) order, and the results were recently used to place bounds on the charge-to-mass ratio of black holes. In this work, we employ the effective field theory approach, with a metric parametrization based on a temporal Kaluza-Klein decomposition and nonrelativistic gravitational fields, to derive the Lagrangian for binary motion under the influence of charges up to 2PN order. Our results provide the foundation for deriving precision predictions of the effect of charges on the inspiral of binary black holes for gravitational wave astronomy.

The secondary anisotropies of the cosmic microwave background (CMB) provide a wealth of astrophysical and cosmological information. Pairing measurements of the CMB temperature map obtained by DR5 of the Atacama Cosmology Telescope (ACT) with the imaging survey conducted by the Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument for the purposes of target selection, DECaLS DR9, we investigate two effects that are sensitive to the gas density $\tau$: kinematic Sunyaev-Zel’dovich (kSZ) and patchy screening or anisotropic screening (resulting from the Thomson scattering of CMB photons away from the line-of-sight by free electrons). In particular, we measure the stacked profiles of the gas density around luminous red galaxies (LRGs) at a mean redshift of $z\approx 0.7$. We detect the kSZ signal at $7.2\sigma$, and we find a signal at $\sim 4.1\sigma$ for the patchy screening estimator, which is in excess relative to the kSZ signal. We attribute this excess to contamination from CMB lensing. We demonstrate the effect of lensing using $N$-body simulations, and we show that the screening signal is dominated by it. Accounting for lensing, our measurement places a 95% upper bound on the optical depth of the Extended DESI LRG sample of $\tau <2.5$ ${10}^{-4}$ for a mean value of the sample of $\tau \approx 1.6$ ${10}^{-4}$. Furthermore, via hydro simulations, we show that the underlying optical depth signal measured by both effects (after removing the CMB lensing contribution) is in perfect agreement when adopting either a compensated aperture photometry (CAP) filter or a high-pass filter. Consistent with previous measurements, we see evidence for excess baryonic feedback around DESI LRGs in the patchy screening measurement. In the future, when both effects can be measured with high signal-to-noise, one can measure the amplitude ratio between them, which is proportional to the root-mean-square velocity of the host halo sample, and even place constraints on velocity-sensitive models such as modified gravity and phantom dark energy.

We present primordial non-Gaussianity predictions from a new high-precision code for simulating axion-U(1) inflation on a discrete lattice. We measure the primordial scalar curvature power spectrum and bispectrum from our simulations, determining their dependence on both scale and axion-gauge coupling strength. Both the gauge-sourced power spectrum and the bispectrum exhibit a strong blue tilt due to our choice of an $\alpha$-attractor inflaton potential. We provide fitting functions for the power spectrum and bispectrum that accurately reproduce these statistics across a wide range of scales and coupling strengths. While our fitting function for the bispectrum has a separable form, results from high-resolution simulations demonstrate that the full shape is not separable. Thus, our simulations generate realizations of primordial curvature perturbations with nontrivial correlators that cannot be generated using standard techniques for primordial non-Gaussianity. We derive bounds on the axion-gauge coupling strength based on the bispectrum constraints from the cosmic microwave background, demonstrating a new method for constraining inflationary primordial non-Gaussianity by simulating the nonlinear dynamics.

Axions are an elegant solution to the strong $CP$ problem for particle physics and a promising dark matter candidate. They can convert into photons under a strong magnetic field, while magnetars with extreme magnetic fields are natural labs for axion detection. Radio telescopes can detect the radio emission from axion-photon conversion near magnetars. In this study, we have refined the calculation of axion-photon conversion and developed the matched filtering integration method to largely improve the signal-to-noise ratio. We validate our method using end-to-end simulation and real observational data from Tian Ma radio telescope (TMRT). A new constraint is set with only 3596 seconds of observations with TMRT. Using ten hours of observation with the high-frequency receiver in Five-hundred-meter Aperture Spherical radio Telescope or square kilometre array, we can reach the theoretical coupling constant prediction for the axion mass range from $1\mathrm{\mu }\mathrm{eV}$ to $100\mathrm{\mu }\mathrm{eV}$. We validate the possibility of axion detection with radio telescopes and avoid spectrum confusion.