Using the relativistic flux tube model with spin-dependent corrections, we present a unified investigation of the mass spectra for singly bottom mesons ($B$, $B_s$) and doubly bottom baryons (${\mathrm{\Xi }}_{bb}$, ${\mathrm{\Omega }}_{bb}$). Within this framework, the calculated masses for established $B$ and $B_s$ meson states show excellent agreement with experimental data. Leveraging these reliable predictions for low-lying states, we propose spectroscopic assignments for several higher excitations: we identify the $B_J^{*}(5732)$ resonance as an excellent candidate for the $1P(1^{+})$ state; further, we assign the $B_J(5840)$ resonance as the first radial excitation ($2S$), and the $B_J(5970)$ resonance as a $1D$-wave orbital excitation. In the bottom-strange sector, we predict that the recently observed $B_{sJ}(6063)$ and $B_{sJ}(6114)$ resonances belong to the $1D$-wave multiplet. Extending our model to doubly bottom baryons, we present comprehensive predictions for the spectra of the ${\mathrm{\Xi }}_{bb}$ and ${\mathrm{\Omega }}_{bb}$ baryons, identifying their ground and excited states. These theoretical insights serve as valuable benchmarks, offering guidance for future experimental searches targeting yet-to-be-discovered bottom mesons and doubly bottom baryons.

In the Standard Model (SM), charged lepton flavor-violating (LFV) processes are strictly forbidden, and thus observation of LFV would signal the presence of new physics. Recently, the Muon $g-2$ Collaboration at Fermilab reported their final result for the muon magnetic dipole moment (MDM), which is now consistent with the latest SM prediction at the $1\sigma$ level. This imposes a significant constraint on new-physics contributions to $(g-2{)}_{\mu }$. In this work, we study the LFV processes ${\ell }_j^{-}\to {\ell }_i^{-}\gamma$ and ${\ell }_j^{-}\to {\ell }_i^{-}{\ell }_i^{-}{\ell }_i^{+}$ within the framework of the triplet next-to-minimal supersymmetric standard model (TNMSSM). We include two-loop contributions to the muon MDM and investigate the resulting constraints on the model parameter space. Our numerical analysis shows that, in the TNMSSM, doubly charged Higgs bosons and the couplings $Y_L$ and $Y_D$ associated with the type-I+II seesaw mechanism play a crucial role in both LFV processes and the muon MDM. Moreover, two-loop electroweak corrections have a significant impact on the muon MDM in this framework.

Axions are hypothetical pseudo-Nambu Goldstone bosons that could explain the observed cold dark matter density and solve the strong $CP$ problem of QCD. Haloscope experiments commonly employ resonant cavities to search for a conversion of axion dark matter into photons in external magnetic fields. As the expected signal power degrades with increasing frequency, this approach becomes challenging at frequencies beyond tens of gigahertz. Here, we propose a novel haloscope design based on an open Fabry-Pérot resonator. Operating a small-scale resonator at cryogenic temperatures and at modest magnetic fields should already lead to an unparalleled sensitivity for photon-axion couplings $g_{a\gamma }\gtrsim 3\times {10}^{-12}{\mathrm{GeV}}^{-1}$ at 35 GHz. We demonstrate how this sensitivity could be further improved using graded-phase mirrors and sketch possibilities to probe benchmark models of the QCD axion.

We reinterpret the Nieh-Yan (NY) anomaly using holography, finding that the U(1) axial symmetry remains unbroken and the axial current coupling to an external gauge field is conserved. Instead, the anomaly arises from a breakdown of Hodge duality relations between fermion bilinears due to symmetry constraints on one-form currents. We show that the axial response associated with the NY term is distinct from the chiral vortical effect and exhibits a characteristic $T^2$ dependence. Torsion-induced axial transport decouples spin and axial charge dynamics, thereby clarifying the physical significance of the NY anomaly and motivating further field-theoretic and holographic studies.

We study dynamical properties of strongly coupled chiral matter by using the holographic method. We demonstrate, at both linear and nonlinear levels, that perturbations on thermodynamically unstable backgrounds within the spinodal region of chiral first-order phase transitions exhibit dynamic instability. The corresponding magnitude of dynamic instability can be characterized by the critical momentum. Furthermore, we found that, within a certain temperature range, the quasinormal-mode spectrum contains purely imaginary diffusive modes. As spatial momentum increases, a transition occurs in the system’s long-time dynamics. The dominant contribution shifts from diffusive mode to propagating mode. When the diffusive mode becomes dominant, the spectral function exhibits a transport peak structure in the low-frequency region. A heuristic argument suggests that this particular transition can be related to the chiral symmetry breaking and restoration.

In this work, we investigate the connection between black hole instabilities and Swampland constraints, presenting new insights into the anti–de Sitter (AdS) distance conjecture. By examining the scale at which horizon instabilities of Schwarzschild-${\mathrm{AdS}}_d$ black holes take place—${\mathrm{\Lambda }}_{\mathrm{BH}}$—we uncover a universal scaling relation, ${\mathrm{\Lambda }}_{\mathrm{BH}}\sim |{\mathrm{\Lambda }}_{\mathrm{AdS}}{|}^{\alpha }$, with $\frac{1}{d}\le \alpha \le \frac{1}{2}$, linking the emergence of towers of states directly to instability scales as ${\mathrm{\Lambda }}_{\mathrm{AdS}}\to 0$. This approach circumvents the explicit dependence on field-space distances, offering a refined formulation of the AdS distance conjecture grounded in physical black hole scales. From a top-down perspective, we find that these instability scales correspond precisely to the Gregory-Laflamme and Horowitz-Polchinski transitions, as expected for the flat space limit, and consistently with our proposed bounds. Furthermore, revisiting explicit calculations in type IIB string theory on ${\mathrm{AdS}}_5\times S^5$, we illustrate how higher-derivative corrections may alter these bounds, potentially extending their applicability toward the interior of moduli space. Using also general results about gravitational collapse in AdS, our analysis points toward a possible breakdown of the conjecture in $d>10$, suggesting an intriguing upper limit on the number of noncompact spacetime dimensions. Finally, we briefly discuss parallel considerations and implications for the dS case.

We explore four-dimensional scalar-tensor theories obtained from well-defined dimensional regularizations of Lovelock invariants. When an infinite tower of corrections is considered, these theories allow for cosmological models in which the big bang singularity is replaced by an inflationary phase in the early Universe, and they also admit a specific class of regular black hole solutions.

We study the formation of primordial black holes (PBHs) from the collapse of density perturbations induced by primordial gravitational waves (PGWs). The PGWs’ interpretation of the stochastic gravitational wave background detected by the pulsar timing array corresponds to PBH formation in the mass range $[{10}^{-12}-{10}^{-3}]M_{\odot }$. Importantly, our analysis shows that PGWs’ interpretation of recent pulsar timing array data remains viable, as it does not lead to PBH overproduction. We derive the amplitude of PGWs by leveraging existing constraints on the PBH abundance across a wide mass range. Notably, these constrained amplitudes predict stochastic gravitational wave background signals that would be detectable by future gravitational wave observatories.

In the absence of a higher-dimensional analog to the Kerr-Newman black hole, five-dimensional Einstein-Maxwell theory with a Chern-Simons term has become a natural setting for studying charged, stationary solutions. A prominent example is the Chong-Cvetič-Lü-Pope (CCLP) solution, which describes a nonextremal black hole with electric charge and two independent angular momenta. This solution has been widely studied, and generalizations have been proposed. In this paper, we revisit a large family of five-dimensional black hole solutions to Einstein-Maxwell-Chern-Simons (EMCS) field equations, which admits to be written in terms of a generalized Plebański-Demiański ansatz and includes the CCLP and the Kerr-NUT-anti–de Sitter solutions as particular cases. We show that the complete family can be brought to the CCLP form by means of a suitable coordinate transformation and a complex redefinition of parameters. Then, we compute the conserved charges associated to the CCLP form of the metric by analyzing the near-horizon asymptotic symmetries. We show that the zero mode of the near-horizon charges exactly match the result of the Komar integrals.

Effective field theory (EFT) modeling is expected to be a useful tool in the era of future higher-redshift galaxy surveys such as DESI-II and Spec-S5 due to its robust description of various large-scale structure tracers. However, large values of EFT bias parameters of higher-redshift galaxies could jeopardize the convergence of the perturbative expansion. In this paper we measure the bias parameters and other EFT coefficients from samples of two types of star-forming galaxies in the state-of-the-art MilleniumTNG and astrid hydrodynamical simulations. Our measurements are based on the field-level EFT forward model that allows for precision EFT parameter measurements by virtue of cosmic variance cancellation. Specifically, we consider approximately representative samples of Lyman-break galaxies (LBGs) and Lyman-$\alpha$ emitters (LAEs) that are consistent with the observed (angular) clustering and number density of these galaxies at $z=3$. Reproducing the linear biases and number densities observed from existing LAE and LBG data, we find quadratic bias parameters that are roughly consistent with those predicted from the halo model coupled with a simple halo occupation distribution model. We also find nonperturbative velocity contributions (fingers of God) of a similar size for LBGs to the familiar case of luminous red galaxies. However, these contributions are quite small for LAEs despite their large satellite fraction values of up to $\sim 30\%$. Our results indicate that the effective momentum reach $k_{\max }$ at $z=3$ for LAEs (LBGs) will be in the range $0.3-0.6h{\mathrm{Mpc}}^{-1}$ ($0.2-0.8h{\mathrm{Mpc}}^{-1}$), suggesting that EFT will perform well for high-redshift galaxy clustering. This work provides the first step toward obtaining realistic simulation-based priors on EFT parameters for LAEs and LBGs.

This paper investigates the thermodynamic evolution of the Universe within the framework of a quadratic equation of state (EOS). Building upon the basis of the quadratic EOS model, as a phenomenological extension to dark energy models, we analyze the implications for cosmic dynamics, including energy density evolution of effective dark matter and dark energy, entropy behavior, and convexity stability conditions. Our approach emphasizes the significance of thermodynamic principles in understanding the late-time acceleration and the crossing of the phantom divide, providing a cohesive description consistent with recent observational data. Moreover, we demonstrate that the $\mathrm{\Lambda }\mathrm{CDM}$ model, regardless of entropy additivity, violates the convexity condition, while the quadratic model aligns with maximum entropy and may prevent a big rip scenario.

We revisit the recent debate on the evidence for an overtone in the black hole ringdown of GW150914 using an independent data-analysis pipeline. By gating and inpainting the data, we discard the contamination from earlier parts of the gravitational wave signal before ringdown. This enables parameter estimation to be conducted in the frequency domain, which is mathematically equivalent to the time domain method. We keep the settings as similar as possible to the previous studies by Cotesta et al. [Phys. Rev. Lett. 129, 111102 (2022)] and Isi et al. [Phys. Rev. Lett. 123, 111102 (2019); arXiv:2202.02941] which yielded conflicting results on the Bayes factor of the overtone. Our aim is to understand how different data analysis systematics, including sampling rates, erroneous timestamps, and the frequency resolution of the noise power spectrum, would influence the statistical significance of an overtone. Our main results indicate the following: (i) a low-resolution estimation of the noise power spectrum tends to diminish the significance of overtones, (ii) adjusting the start time to a later digitized point reduces the significance of overtones, and (iii) overtone evidence varies with different sampling rates if the start time is too early, indicating that the overtone is a poor model, hence we propose a convergence test to verify the validity of an overtone model. With these issues addressed, we find the Bayes factors for the overtone to range from 10 to 26 in a range of times centered at the best-fit merger time of GW150914, which supports the existence of an overtone in agreement with the conclusions of Isi et al. in the above papers. These results are obtained by keeping the start time and sky location fixed, enabling a direct comparison with other work. Marginalizing over these parameters would lower the Bayes factor to 1 for the evidence of an overtone.

The Laser Interferometer Space Antenna (LISA), a spaceborne gravitational wave (GW) detector set to launch in 2035, will observe several stochastic GW backgrounds in the mHz frequency band. At least one of these signals—arising from the tens of millions of unresolved white dwarf binaries in the Milky Way—is expected to be highly anisotropic on the sky. We evaluate the angular resolution of LISA and its ability to characterize anisotropic stochastic GW backgrounds (ASGWBs) using the Bayesian spherical harmonic formalism in the Bayesian LISA Inference Package (blip). We use blip to simulate and analyze ASGWB signals in LISA across a large grid in total observing time, ASGWB amplitude, and angular size. We consider the ability of the blip anisotropic search algorithm to both characterize single point sources and to separate two point sources on the sky, using a full-width half-max (FWHM) metric to measure the quality and spread of the recovered spatial distributions. We find that the number of spherical harmonic coefficients used in the anisotropic search model is the primary factor that limits the search’s angular resolution. Notably, this trend continues until computational limitations become relevant around ${\ell }_{\max }=16$; this exceeds the maximum angular resolution achieved by other map-making techniques for LISA ASGWBs.

Using the local equilibrium density operator, we develop a geometry-informed linear response theory that takes into account the parametrization of the freeze-out hypersurface before the gradient expansion is carried out. Assuming local equilibrium on an iso-energy density hypersurface, we study the $\mathrm{\Lambda }$ hyperon spin polarization, and compute corrections to the isothermal case due to finite density. We argue that corrections to isothermal freeze-out should be small, and that even in heavy ion collisions with energy as low as $\sqrt{s_{NN}}=11.5\mathrm{GeV}$ they constitute at most a 10% effect. They may, however, become relevant for local polarization observables.

We investigate the helicity amplitudes of the $N(1520)$ and $N(1535)$ resonances in the electromagnetic transition process ${\gamma }^{*}p\to N^{*}$, where the $N(1520)$ and $N(1535)$ are assumed to include both the $L=1$ three-quark and $L=0$ spatial symmetric $q^4\overline{q}$ pentaquark components. The helicity transition amplitudes $A_{1/2}$, $A_{3/2}$ (for spin $3/2$ states) and $S_{1/2}$ are computed within the constituent quark model. The inclusion of the $q^4\overline{q}$ pentaquark components via the ${\gamma }^{*}\to q\overline{q}$ diagram significantly improves the theoretical description of the helicity amplitudes for both $N(1520)$ and $N(1535)$, yielding a closer agreement with experimental data compared to the pure three-quark picture. The work reveals that the $N(1520)$ and $N(1535)$ resonances may contain considerable pentaquark components.

We investigate the Dyson-Schwinger equation for the photon-fermion one-particle irreducible vertex in QED in linear covariant gauges. The longitudinal component of this vertex is described using the Ball-Chiu basis, while its transverse part is expressed with the K𝚤z𝚤lersu-Reenders-Pennington basis. Combining the vertex Ward-Takahashi identity with the vertex equation, we derive a set of exact, nonlinear integral equations governing the transverse vertex. These equations hold for any linear covariant gauge and must be solved self-consistently. We discuss several approximations to the exact equations, generalizing results previously obtained at the perturbative one-loop level. Various kinematical configurations are also examined. Furthermore, we compute the perturbative solution of the transverse vertex Dyson-Schwinger equations for all transverse form factors and derive their perturbative asymptotic expressions.

Baryon number violation in the visible sector induced by antibaryonic dark matter provides a viable mechanism for low-scale baryogenesis. Two of the most sensitive probes of this scenario are neutron decay processes, such as $n\to \overline{\nu }+\text{invisible}$ and $n\to {\pi }^0+\text{invisible}$. In this work, we discuss the possible spontaneous breaking of baryon symmetry in the dark sector and the generation of di-nucleon decay processes, such as $nn\to \overline{\nu }\overline{\nu }$ and $nn\to {\pi }^0{\pi }^0$ at one loop, arising from the operators responsible for induced nucleon decays. While the induced nucleon decay rates in this model depend on the dark matter density, di-nucleon decay processes do not, providing a complementary probe of the new physics. We thus use nucleon and di-nucleon decay bounds to constrain the local density and mass of the antibaryonic dark matter.

We present two models of dark matter (DM) that can provide a natural explanation of the excess of $B^{+}\to K^{+}+\mathrm{invisible}$ events with respect to the Standard Model (SM) prediction for $B^{+}\to K^{+}\nu \overline{\nu }$, which has been reported by the Belle II Collaboration. Interactions between the dark and the visible sector are mediated by an axionlike particle in one case, by the kinetic mixing between a dark photon and the SM photon in the second case. Both models encompass a light fermion singlet as the DM candidate and can account for the observed DM relic abundance through, respectively, the freeze-in and the freeze-out production mechanism, while simultaneously explaining the Belle II excess.

We calculate the scattering rate of sub-GeV dark matter in solid-state targets for spin-dependent dark matter–nucleon interactions. For dark matter particles with mass below 100 MeV, the scattering occurs predominantly through incoherent phonon production. For dark matter heavier than 100 MeV, we match onto the nuclear recoil calculation. To compare the sensitivity of future direct detection experiments with existing constraints, we consider three models with interactions that are mediated by spin-0 or spin-1 particles. This allows us to derive bounds on the cross section from searches for the mediating particle, including bounds from stellar cooling, beam dump experiments, meson factories, and dark matter self-interactions. The existing bounds are very stringent, though for $m_{\chi }\gtrsim 100\mathrm{MeV}$ there is parameter space, which may be accessible with direct detection, depending on the exposure and background rates.