Recent measurements by Planck, LHC experiments, and Xenon100 have significant impact on supersymmetric models and their parameters. We first illustrate the constraints in the mSUGRA plane and then perform a detailed analysis of the general minimal supersymmetric Standard Model (MSSM) with 13 free parameters. Using SFitter, Bayesian and profile likelihood approaches are applied and their results compared. The allowed structures in the parameter spaces are largely defined by different mechanisms of dark matter annihilation in combination with the light Higgs mass prediction. In mSUGRA the pseudoscalar Higgs funnel and stau coannihilation processes are still avoiding experimental pressure. In the MSSM stau coannihilation, the light Higgs funnel, a mixed bino-Higgsino region including the heavy Higgs funnel, and a large Higgsino region predict the correct relic density. Volume effects and changes in the model parameters impact the extracted mSUGRA and MSSM parameter regions in the Bayesian analysis.

In this paper, we examine the interaction of $\overline{B}N$, $\overline{B}\mathrm{\Delta }$, ${\overline{B}}^{*}N$, and ${\overline{B}}^{*}\mathrm{\Delta }$ states, together with their coupled channels, by using a mapping from the light meson sector. The assumption that the heavy quarks act as spectators at the quark level automatically leads us to the results of the heavy quark spin symmetry for pion exchange and reproduces the results of the Weinberg Tomozawa term, coming from light vector exchanges in the extended local hidden gauge approach. With this dynamics we look for states dynamically generated from the interaction and find two states with nearly zero width, which we associate to the ${\mathrm{\Lambda }}_b(5912)$ and ${\mathrm{\Lambda }}_b(5920)$ states. The states couple mostly to ${\overline{B}}^{*}N$, which are degenerate with the Weinberg Tomozawa interaction. The difference of masses between these two states, with $J=1/2$ and $3/2$, respectively, is due to pion exchange connecting these states to intermediate $\overline{B}N$ states. In addition to these two ${\mathrm{\Lambda }}_b$ states, we find three more states with $I=0$, one of them nearly degenerate in two states of $J=1/2$, $3/2$. Furthermore, we also find eight more states in $I=1$, two of them degenerate in $J=1/2$, $3/2$, and another two degenerate in $J=1/2$, $3/2$, $5/2$.

We derive the analytic expression for the one-loop $SU(N_c)$ QCD effective potential including $N_f$ flavor quarks which nonlinearly interact with the chromomagnetic background field and the external $U(1{)}_{\mathrm{em}}$ magnetic field. After the renormalization of couplings and fields, we obtain the correct one-loop $\beta$ functions of both QCD and QED, and the resulting effective potential satisfies the renormalization group equation. We investigate the effect of the magnetic field on the QCD vacuum by using the effective potential, in particular for the color $SU(3)$ case with the three flavors ($u,d,s$). Our result shows that the chromomagnetic field prefers to be parallel to the external magnetic field. Furthermore, quark loop contributions to the effective potential with the magnetic field enhance gluonic contributions, and then the chromomagnetic condensate increases with an increasing magnetic field. This result supports the recent observed gluonic magnetic catalysis at zero-temperature in lattice QCD.

We investigate the potential of the process $gg\to H\to WW$ to provide bounds on the Higgs width. Recent studies using off-shell $H\to ZZ$ events have shown that Run 1 LHC data can constrain the Higgs width, ${\mathrm{\Gamma }}_H<(25–45){\mathrm{\Gamma }}_H^{\mathrm{SM}}$. Using $20{\mathrm{fb}}^{-1}$ of 8 TeV ATLAS data, we estimate a bound on the Higgs boson width from the $WW$ channel between ${\mathrm{\Gamma }}_H<(100–500){\mathrm{\Gamma }}_H^{\mathrm{SM}}$. The large spread in limits is due to the range of cuts applied in the existing experimental analysis. The stricter cuts designed to search for the on-shell Higgs boson limit the potential number of off-shell events, weakening the constraints. As some of the cuts are lifted, the bounds improve. We show that there is potential in the high transverse mass region to produce upper bounds of the order of $(25–50){\mathrm{\Gamma }}_H^{\mathrm{SM}}$, depending strongly on the level of systematic uncertainty that can be obtained. Thus, if these systematics can be controlled, a constraint on the Higgs boson width from the $H\to WW$ decay mode can complement a corresponding limit from $H\to ZZ$.

The global positioning system (GPS) is composed of 31 satellites having atomic clocks with ${10}^{-15}$ accuracy on board and enables one to calibrate the primary standard for frequency on the ground. Using the fact that oscillators on the ground have been successfully stabilized with high accuracy by receiving radio waves emitted from the GPS satellites, we set a constraint on the strain amplitude of the gravitational wave background $h_{\mathrm{c}}$. We find that the GPS has already placed a meaningful constraint, and the constraint on the continuous component of gravitational waves is given as $h_{\mathrm{c}}<4.8\times {10}^{-12}(1/f)$ at ${10}^{-2}\lesssim f\lesssim {10}^0\mathrm{Hz}$ for stabilized oscillators with $\mathrm{\Delta }\nu /\nu \simeq {10}^{-12}$. Thanks to the advantage of the Doppler tracking method, seismic oscillations do not affect the current constraint. Constraints on $h_{\mathrm{c}}$ in the same frequency range from the velocity measurements by the lunar explorers in the Apollo mission are also derived.

We construct smeared conformal field theory (CFT) operators which represent a scalar field in anti–de Sitter (AdS) space interacting with gravity. The guiding principle is microcausality: scalar fields should commute with themselves at spacelike separation. To $\mathcal{O}(1/N)$ we show that a correct and convenient criterion for constructing the appropriate CFT operators is to demand microcausality in a three-point function with a boundary Weyl tensor and another boundary scalar. The resulting bulk observables transform in the correct way under AdS isometries and commute with boundary scalar operators at spacelike separation, even in the presence of metric perturbations.

According to the AdS/CFT correspondence, the $\mathcal{N}=4$ supersymmetric Yang-Mills theory is studied through its gravity dual, whose configuration has two boundaries at the opposite sides of the fifth coordinate. At these boundaries, in general, the four-dimensional (4D) metrics are different; then we expect different properties for the theory living in two boundaries. It is studied how these two different properties of the theory are obtained from a common 5D bulk manifold in terms of the holographic method. We could show in our case that the two theories on the different boundaries are described by the ${\mathrm{AdS}}_5$, which is separated into two regions by a domain wall. This domain wall is given by a special point of the fifth coordinate. Some issues of the entanglement entropy related to this bulk configuration are also discussed.

We discuss $\beta$-deformed geometries on two types of $T^3$’s where the direction along the third coordinate is not orthogonal to the direction along the second coordinate or the direction along the first coordinate. We show that the intersection angle between the direction along the third coordinate and the direction along the second coordinate corresponds to the parameter of the S-duality of the $\beta$-deformation, while the intersection angle between the direction along the third coordinate and the direction along the first coordinate generalizes the $\beta$-deformed geometry.

Nonrelativistic charged open strings coupled with Abelian gauge fields are quantized in a geometric representation that generalizes the loop representation. The model consists of open strings interacting through a Kalb-Ramond field in four dimensions. The geometric representation proposed uses lines and surfaces that can be interpreted as an extension of the picture of Faraday’s lines of classical electromagnetism. This representation is consistent, provided the coupling constant (the “charge” of the string) is quantized. The Schrödinger equation in this representation is also presented.

The superflow in a superfluid is bounded from above by Landau’s critical velocity. Within a microscopic bosonic model, I show that below this critical velocity there is a dynamical instability that manifests itself in an imaginary sound velocity and that is reminiscent of the two-stream instability in electromagnetic plasmas. I compute the onset of this instability and its full angular structure in a relativistic, uniform superfluid for all temperatures. At weak coupling, the instability only operates in a very small region in the phase diagram of temperature and superflow. Varying the coupling of the model suggests that the effect is more prominent at strong coupling and thus could be important for superfluids in compact stars and in the laboratory.

We study holographic entanglement entropy for certain logarithmic conformal field theories by making use of their gravity descriptions. The corresponding gravity descriptions are provided by higher-derivative gravity at critical points where the equations of motion degenerate leading to a log gravity. When a central charge of the dual theory is zero, the entanglement entropy has a new divergent term whose coefficient is given by the “new anomaly” of the logarithmic conformal field theory.

In this paper, the effect of Hawking radiation on the multipartite entanglement of Dirac particles in the background of a Schwarzschild black hole is investigated. It is shown that all the 1-tangles decrease as the Hawking temperature grows, and the Coffman–Kundu–Wootters monogamy inequality is always saturated in this system. It is also shown that the entanglement’s status of subsystems, which have the same quantum state, depend on its detector’s position, and this proposition can be generalized to a multipartite system. Then, we find that the Hawking effect does not change the entanglement structure of the quantum state in Schwarzschild space-time. In addition, we discuss the distributions of quantum information and find that not only is the entanglement redistributed, but also the mutual information is distributed to the physical inaccessible region. At last, we calculate the mutual information of a $N$-qubit multipartite system, ${|\mathrm{\Psi }⟩}_{123\dots N}={(\beta {|0⟩}^{\otimes N}+\sqrt{1-{\beta }^2}{|1⟩}^{\otimes N})}_{123\dots N}$, and draw a conclusion that when the black hole approximates to evaporate completely the mutual information of this system will be close to $(N-1)/N$ of the original if a particle freely falls in toward a Schwarzschild black hole and locates near the event horizon, and the other particles remain in the asymptotically flat region.

We prove the existence of zero modes of massless quarks in a background of spaghetti vacuum of chromomagnetic vortices in QCD. We find a general solution for the zero modes and show that the modes can be localized at pairs of vortices.

Recent measurements by the Planck experiment of the power spectrum of temperature anisotropies in the cosmic microwave background radiation reveal a deficit of power in low multipoles compared to the predictions from best-fit $\mathrm{\Lambda }\mathrm{CDM}$ cosmology. If the low-$\ell$ anomaly persists after additional observations and analysis, it might be explained by the presence of primordial isocurvature perturbations in addition to the usual adiabatic spectrum, and hence may provide the first robust evidence that early-Universe inflation involved more than one scalar field. In this paper we explore the production of isocurvature perturbations in nonminimally coupled two-field inflation. We find that this class of models readily produces enough power in the isocurvature modes to account for the Planck low-$\ell$ anomaly, while also providing excellent agreement with the other Planck results.

We analyze gravitational theories with quadratic curvature terms, including the case of conformally invariant Weyl gravity, motivated by the intention to find a renormalizable theory of gravity in the ultraviolet region, yet yielding general relativity at long distances. In the Hamiltonian formulation of Weyl gravity, the number of local constraints is equal to the number of unstable directions in phase space, which in principle could be sufficient for eliminating the unstable degrees of freedom in the full nonlinear theory. All the other theories of quadratic type are unstable—a problem appearing as ghost modes in the linearized theory. We find that the full projection of the Weyl tensor onto a three-dimensional hypersurface contains an additional fully traceless component, given by a quadratic extrinsic curvature tensor. A certain inconsistency in the literature is found and resolved: when the conformal invariance of Weyl gravity is broken by a cosmological constant term, the theory becomes pathological, since a constraint required by the Hamiltonian analysis imposes the determinant of the metric of spacetime to be zero. In order to resolve this problem by restoring the conformal invariance, we introduce a new scalar field that couples to the curvature of spacetime, reminiscent of the introduction of vector fields for ensuring the gauge invariance.

We present a novel analytic extraction of high-order post-Newtonian (pN) parameters that govern quasicircular binary systems. Coefficients in the pN expansion of the energy of a binary system can be found from corresponding coefficients in an extreme-mass-ratio inspiral computation of the change $\mathrm{\Delta }U$ in the redshift factor of a circular orbit at fixed angular velocity. Remarkably, by computing this essentially gauge-invariant quantity to accuracy greater than one part in ${10}^{225}$, and by assuming that a subset of pN coefficients are rational numbers or products of $\pi$ and a rational, we obtain the exact analytic coefficients. We find the previously unexpected result that the post-Newtonian expansion of $\mathrm{\Delta }U$ (and of the change $\mathrm{\Delta }\mathrm{\Omega }$ in the angular velocity at fixed redshift factor) have conservative terms at half-integral pN order beginning with a 5.5 pN term. This implies the existence of a corresponding 5.5 pN term in the expansion of the energy of a binary system. Coefficients in the pN series that do not belong to the subset just described are obtained to accuracy better than 1 part in ${10}^{265-23n}$ at $n$th pN order. We work in a radiation gauge, finding the radiative part of the metric perturbation from the gauge-invariant Weyl scalar ${\psi }_0$ via a Hertz potential. We use mode-sum renormalization, and find high-order renormalization coefficients by matching a series in $L=\ell +1/2$ to the large-$L$ behavior of the expression for $\mathrm{\Delta }U$. The nonradiative parts of the perturbed metric associated with changes in mass and angular momentum are calculated in the Schwarzschild gauge.

We build the general conformally invariant linear wave operator for a free, symmetric, second-rank tensor field in a $d$-dimensional ($d\ge 2$) metric manifold, and explicitly show the special case of maximally symmetric spaces. Under the assumptions made, this conformally invariant wave operator is unique. The corresponding conformally invariant wave equation can be obtained from a Lagrangian which is explicitly given. We discuss how our result compares to previous works; in particular, we hope to clarify the situation between conflicting results.

We study a formulation of Dirac fermions in curved spacetime that respects general coordinate invariance as well as invariance under local spin-base transformations. The natural variables for this formulation are spacetime-dependent Dirac matrices subject to the Clifford-algebra constraint. In particular, a coframe, i.e. vierbein field is not required. The corresponding affine spin connection consists of a canonical part that is completely fixed in terms of the Dirac matrices and a free part that can be interpreted as spin torsion. A general variation of the Dirac matrices naturally induces a spinorial Lie derivative which coincides with the known Kosmann-Lie derivative in the absence of torsion. Using this formulation for building a field theory of quantized gravity and matter fields, we show that it suffices to quantize the metric and the matter fields. This observation is of particular relevance for field theory approaches to quantum gravity, as it can serve for a purely metric-based quantization scheme for gravity even in the presence of fermions.

The field equations of noncommutative gravity can be obtained by replacing all exterior products by twist-deformed exterior products in the action functional of general relativity and are here studied by requiring that the torsion 2-form should vanish and that the Lorentz-Lie-algebra-valued part of the full connection 1-form should be self-dual. Two other conditions, expressing self-duality of a pair 2-forms occurring in the full curvature 2-form, are also imposed. This leads to a systematic solution strategy, here displayed for the first time, where all parts of the connection 1-form are first evaluated, and hence the full curvature 2-form, and eventually all parts of the tetrad 1-form, when expanded on the basis of $\gamma$ matrices. By assuming asymptotic expansions which hold up to first order in the noncommutativity matrix in the neighborhood of the vanishing value for noncommutativity, we find a family of self-dual solutions of the field equations. This is generated by solving first an inhomogeneous wave equation on 1-forms in a classical curved spacetime (which is itself self-dual and solves the vacuum Einstein equations), subject to the Lorenz gauge condition. In particular, when the classical undeformed geometry is Kasner spacetime, the above scheme is fully computable out of solutions of the scalar wave equation in such a Kasner model.

The brane world description of our Universe entails a large extra dimension and a fundamental scale of gravity that may be lower than the Planck scale by several orders of magnitude. An interesting consequence of this scenario occurs in the nature of spherically symmetric vacuum solutions to the brane gravitational field equations, which often have properties quite distinct from the standard black hole solutions of general relativity. In this paper, the spherically symmetric collapse on the brane world of four types of null fluid, governed by the barotropic, polytropic, strange quark “bag” model and Hagedorn equations of state, is investigated. In each case, we solve the approximate gravitational field equations, obtained in the high-density limit, determine the equation which governs the formation of apparent horizons and investigate the conditions for the formation of naked singularities. Though, naively, one would expect the increased effective energy density on the brane to favor the formation of black holes over naked singularities, we find that, for the types of fluid considered, this is not the case. However, the black hole solutions differ substantially from their general-relativistic counterparts and brane world corrections often play a role analogous to charge in general relativity. As an astrophysical application of this work, the possibility that energy emission from a Hagedorn fluid collapsing to form a naked singularity may be a source of GRBs in the brane world is also considered.