Dark matter annihilation into charged particles is necessarily accompanied by gamma rays, produced via radiative corrections. Internal bremsstrahlung from the final state particles can produce hard gamma rays up to the dark matter mass, with an approximately model-independent spectrum. Focusing on annihilation into electrons, we compute robust upper bounds on the dark matter self-annihilation cross section $⟨{\sigma }_{A}v{⟩}_{e^{+}{e}^{-}}$ using gamma-ray data from the Milky Way spanning a wide range of energies $\sim {10}^{-3}–{10}^4\mathrm{GeV}$. We also compute corresponding bounds for the other charged leptons. We make conservative assumptions about the astrophysical inputs, and demonstrate how our derived bounds would be strengthened if stronger assumptions about these inputs are adopted. The fraction of hard gamma rays near the end point accompanying annihilation to $e^{+}{e}^{-}$ is only a factor of $\lesssim {10}^2$ lower than for annihilation directly to monoenergetic gamma rays. The bound on $⟨{\sigma }_{A}v{⟩}_{e^{+}{e}^{-}}$ is thus weaker than that for $⟨{\sigma }_{A}v{⟩}_{\gamma \gamma }$ by this same factor. The upper bounds on the annihilation cross sections to charged leptons are compared with an upper bound on the total annihilation cross section defined by neutrinos.

Recently the PAMELA satellite-based experiment reported an excess of galactic positrons that could be a signal of annihilating dark matter. The PAMELA data may admit an interpretation as a signal from a winolike lightest supersymmetric particle of mass about 200 GeV, normalized to the local relic density, and annihilating mainly into $W$ bosons. This possibility requires the current conventional estimate for the energy loss rate of positrons to be too large by roughly a factor of 5. Data from antiprotons and gamma rays also provide tension with this interpretation, but there are significant astrophysical uncertainties associated with their propagation. It is not unreasonable to take this well-motivated candidate seriously, at present, in part because it can be tested in several ways soon. The forthcoming PAMELA data on higher energy positrons and the Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope (formerly the Gamma-ray Large Area Space Telescope) data should provide important clues as to whether this scenario is correct. If correct, the wino interpretation implies a cosmological history in which the dark matter does not originate in thermal equilibrium.

A consistent implementation of quantum gravity is expected to change the familiar notions of space, time, and the propagation of matter in drastic ways. This will have consequences on very small scales, but also gives rise to correction terms in evolution equations of modes relevant for observations. In particular, the evolution of inhomogeneities in the very early Universe should be affected. In this paper consistent evolution equations for gauge-invariant perturbations in the presence of inverse triad corrections of loop quantum gravity are derived. Some immediate effects are pointed out, for instance, concerning conservation of power on large scales and nonadiabaticity. It is also emphasized that several critical corrections can only be seen to arise in a fully consistent treatment where the gauge freedom of canonical gravity is not fixed before implementing quantum corrections. In particular, metric modes must be allowed to be inhomogeneous: it is not consistent to assume only matter inhomogeneities on a quantum-corrected homogeneous background geometry. In this way, stringent consistency conditions arise for possible quantization ambiguities, which will eventually be further constrained observationally.

We consider sound waves in superfluid nucleon-hyperon matter of massive neutron-star cores. We calculate and analyze the speeds of sound modes and their damping times due to the shear viscosity and nonequilibrium weak processes of particle transformations. For that, we employ the dissipative relativistic hydrodynamics of a superfluid nucleon-hyperon mixture, formulated recently [1]. We demonstrate that the damping times of sound modes calculated using this hydrodynamics and the ordinary (nonsuperfluid) one, can differ from each other by several orders of magnitude.

We introduce a new statistical technique for extracting the inhomogeneous reionization signal from future high-sensitivity measurements of the cosmic microwave background (CMB) temperature and polarization fields. If reionization is inhomogeneous, then the optical depth to recombination will be a function $\tau (\widehat{\mathbf{n}})$ of position on the sky. Anisotropies in $\tau (\widehat{\mathbf{n}})$ alter the statistics of the observed CMB via several physical mechanisms: screening of the surface of last scattering, generation of new polarization via Thomson scattering from reionization bubbles, and the kinetic Sunyaev-Zel’dovich effect. We construct a quadratic estimator ${\widehat{\tau }}_{\ell m}$ for the modes of the $\tau$ field. This estimator separates the patchy reionization signal from the CMB in the form of a noisy map, which can be cross correlated with other probes of reionization or used as a standalone probe. A future satellite experiment with sufficient sensitivity and resolution to measure the lensed $B$ modes on most of the sky can constrain key parameters of patchy reionization, such as the duration of the patchy epoch or the mean bubble radius, at the $\sim 10\%$ level.

We consider the possibility that astrophysical black holes (BHs) can violate the Kerr bound; i.e., they can have angular momentum greater than BH mass, $J>M$. We discuss implications on the BH apparent shape. Even if the bound is violated by a small amount, the shadow cast by the BH changes significantly (it is $\sim$ an order of magnitude smaller) from the case with $J\le M$ and can be used as a clear observational signature in the search for super-spinning BHs. We discuss briefly recent observations in the mm range of the supermassive BH at the center of the Galaxy, speculating on the possibility that it might violate the Kerr bound.

Within a theoretical framework that accounts for all open-charm mesons, including the $D_0^{*}(2308)$, the $D_{sJ}^{*}(2317)$, and the $D_{sJ}(2460)$, we analyze the structure and explore possible quantum number assignments for the $D_{sJ}(2860)$ and the $D_{sJ}(2700)$ mesons reported by BABAR and Belle Collaborations. The open-charm sector is properly described if considered as a combination of conventional quark-antiquark states and four-quark components. All negative parity and $2^{+}$ states can be understood in terms only of $q\overline{q}$ components, however the description of the $0^{+}$ and $1^{+}$ mesons is improved whenever the mixing between two- and four-quark configurations is included. We analyze all possible quantum number assignments for the $D_{sJ}(2860)$ in terms of both $c\overline{s}$ and $cn\overline{s}\overline{n}$ configurations. We discuss the role played by the electromagnetic and strong decay widths as basic tools to distinguish among them. The broad structure reported by BABAR near 2.7 GeV is also analyzed.

Anomalies have infrared and ultraviolet ingredients, and are often realized in effective theories in a nontrivial way. We study the chiral anomaly in soft collinear effective theory (SCET), where the anomaly equation has terms contributing at different orders in the power expansion. The chiral anomaly equations in SCET are computed up to next-to-next-to-leading order in the power counting with external collinear and/or ultrasoft gluons. We do this by expanding the QCD anomaly equation, using the tree level (leading order in ${\alpha }_s$) relations between QCD and SCET fields. The validity of this correspondence between the anomaly equations is confirmed by direct computation of the one-loop diagrams in SCET.

We reexamine the one-loop renormalization group equations (RGEs) for the dimensionful parameters of the minimal supersymmetric standard model (MSSM) with broken supersymmetry, allowing for arbitrary flavor structure of the soft SUSY-breaking parameters. We include threshold effects by evaluating the $\beta$-functions in a sequence of (nonsupersymmetric) effective theories with heavy particles decoupled at the scale of their mass. We present the most general form for high-scale, soft SUSY-breaking parameters that obtains if we assume that the supersymmetry-breaking mechanism does not introduce new intergenerational couplings. This form, possibly amended to allow additional sources of flavor-violation, serves as a boundary condition for solving the RGEs for the dimensionful MSSM parameters. We then present illustrative examples of numerical solutions to the RGEs. We find that in a SUSY grand unified theory with the scale of SUSY scalars split from that of gauginos and higgsinos, the gaugino mass unification condition may be violated by $\mathcal{O}(10\%)$. As another illustration, we show that in mSUGRA, the rate for the flavor-violating ${\tilde{t}}_1\to c{\tilde{Z}}_1$ decay obtained using the complete RGE solution is smaller than that obtained using the commonly used “single-step” integration of the RGEs by a factor 10–25, and so may qualitatively change expectations for topologies from top-squark pair production at colliders. Together with the RGEs for dimensionless couplings presented in a companion paper, the RGEs in Appendix B of this paper form a complete set of one-loop MSSM RGEs that include threshold and flavor-effects necessary for two-loop accuracy.

We consider ${\mathrm{B}}_3$ minimal supergravity models where we have one lepton number violating $L_i{Q}_j{\overline{D}}_k$ operator at the grand unification scale. This can alter the supersymmetric mass spectrum leading to a sneutrino as the lightest supersymmetric particle in a large region of parameter space. We take into account the restrictions from neutrino masses, the muon anomalous magnetic moment, $b\to s\gamma$, and other precision measurements. We furthermore investigate existing restrictions from direct searches at LEP, the Tevatron, and the CERN $p\overline{p}$ collider. We then give examples for characteristic signatures at the LHC.

We present the first results of the PACS-CS project which aims to simulate $2+1$ flavor lattice QCD on the physical point with the nonperturbatively $O(a)$-improved Wilson quark action and the Iwasaki gauge action. Numerical simulations are carried out at $\beta =1.9$, corresponding to the lattice spacing of $a=0.0907(13)\mathrm{fm}$, on a ${32}^3\times 64$ lattice with the use of the domain-decomposed HMC algorithm to reduce the up-down quark mass. Further algorithmic improvements make possible the simulation whose up-down quark mass is as light as the physical value. The resulting pseudoscalar meson masses range from 702 MeV down to 156 MeV, which clearly exhibit the presence of chiral logarithms. An analysis of the pseudoscalar meson sector with SU(3) chiral perturbation theory reveals that the next-to-leading order corrections are large at the physical strange quark mass. In order to estimate the physical up-down quark mass, we employ the SU(2) chiral analysis expanding the strange quark contributions analytically around the physical strange quark mass. The SU(2) low energy constants ${\overline{l}}_3$ and ${\overline{l}}_4$ are comparable with the recent estimates by other lattice QCD calculations. We determine the physical point together with the lattice spacing employing $m_{\pi }$, $m_K$ and $m_{\Omega }$ as input. The hadron spectrum extrapolated to the physical point shows an agreement with the experimental values at a few % level of statistical errors, albeit there remain possible cutoff effects. We also find that our results of $f_{\pi }$, $f_K$ and their ratio, where renormalization is carries out perturbatively at one loop, are compatible with the experimental values. For the physical quark masses we obtain $m_{ud}^{\overline{\mathrm{MS}}}$ and $m_s^{\overline{\mathrm{MS}}}$ extracted from the axial-vector Ward-Takahashi identity with the perturbative renormalization factors. We also briefly discuss the results for the static quark potential.

The ground and $P$-wave excited states of $nnn$, $nns$, and $ssn$ baryons are studied in the framework of the field correlator method using the running strong coupling constant in the Coulomb-like part of the three-quark potential. The running coupling is calculated up to two loops in the background perturbation theory. The three-quark problem has been solved using the hyperspherical functions method. The masses of the $S$- and $P$-wave baryons are presented. Our approach reproduces and improves the previous results for the baryon masses obtained for the freezing value of the coupling constant. The string correction for the confinement potential of the orbitally excited baryons, which is the leading contribution of the proper inertia of the rotating strings, is estimated.

The large luminosity and the increased kinematical domain accessible at the LHC will allow one to isolate large numbers of events with multiple parton collisions. Interestingly, the hadron is probed in different points simultaneously in the process, which allows one to obtain information on the correlations between partons in the hadron structure. The whole experimentally accessible information on multiple parton collisions consists in the probability distribution of the elementary interactions, while the inclusive cross sections, usually considered in large $p_t$ processes, acquire a precise statistical meaning as moments of the multiplicity distribution. Conversely different and more “exclusive” cross sections become experimentally viable, providing complementary information on the interaction dynamics. The matter is discussed in detail in the case of hadron-hadron collisions and the role of parton correlations is outlined both in the inclusive and in the exclusive cross sections.

We study the hydrodynamic sound mode using gauge/gravity correspondence by examining a generic black brane background’s response to perturbations. We assume that the background is generated by a single scalar field, and then generalize to the case of multiple scalar fields. The relevant differential equations obeyed by the gauge invariant variables are presented in both cases. Finally, we present an analytical solution to these equations in a special case; this solution allows us to determine the speed of sound and bulk viscosity for certain special metrics. These results may be useful in determining sound mode transport coefficients in phenomenologically motivated holographic models of strongly coupled systems.

We elaborate on the suggestion made in arXiv:0806.3498 that the 3d $\mathcal{N}=8$ superconformal $SU(N)$ Chern-Simons-matter theory of “Lorentzian” Bagger-Lambert-Gustavson type (L-BLG) can be obtained by a scaling limit (involving sending the level $k$ to infinity and redefining the fields) from the $\mathcal{N}=6$ superconformal $U(N)\times U(N)$ Chern-Simons-matter theory of Aharony, Bergman, Jafferis, and Maldacena (ABJM). We show that to implement such limit in a consistent way one is to extend the ABJM theory by an Abelian “ghost” multiplet. The corresponding limit at the 3-algebra level also requires extending the nonantisymmetric Bagger-Lambert 3-algebra underlying the ABJM theory by a negative-norm generator. We draw analogy with similar scaling limits discussed previously for bosonic Chern-Simons theory and comment on some implications of this relation between the ABJM and L-BLG theories.

We study five-dimensional supergravity on $S^1/Z_2$ with a physical $Z_2$-odd vector multiplet, which yields an additional modulus other than the radion. We derive four-dimensional effective theory and find additional terms in the Kähler potential that are peculiar to the multi-moduli case. Such terms can avoid tachyonic soft scalar masses at tree level, which are problematic in the single modulus case. We also show that the flavor structure of the soft terms are different from that in the single modulus case when hierarchical Yukawa couplings are generated by wave function localization in the fifth dimension. We present a concrete model that stabilizes the moduli at a supersymmetry breaking Minkowski minimum and show the low-energy sparticle spectrum.

The ground state of the multiflavor two-dimensional quantum electrodynamics is determined in the presence of finite baryon density, and it is shown that the model possesses two phases: the low-density phase where the external baryon density is totally screened, and the high-density phase where the screening is only partial. The renormalization of the bosonized version of the model is also performed for both the zero and the finite-density model giving massless multiflavor two-dimensional quantum electrodynamics in both cases.

In this paper we derive the probability of the radial profiles of spherically symmetric inhomogeneities in order to provide an improved estimation of the number density of primordial black holes (PBHs). We demonstrate that the probability of PBH formation depends sensitively on the radial profile of the initial configuration. We do this by characterizing this profile with two parameters chosen heuristically: the amplitude of the inhomogeneity and the second radial derivative, both evaluated at the center of the configuration. We calculate the joint probability of initial cosmological inhomogeneities as a function of these two parameters and then find a correspondence between these parameters and those used in numerical computations of PBH formation. Finally, we extend our heuristic study to evaluate the probability of PBH formation taking into account for the first time the radial profile of curvature inhomogeneities.

Applying the Hamilton-Jacobi method beyond the semiclassical approximation prescribed in R. Banerjee and B. R. Majhi, J. High Energy Phys. 06 (2008) 095 for the scalar particle, Hawking radiation as tunneling of the Dirac particle through an event horizon is analyzed. We show that, as before, all quantum corrections in the single particle action are proportional to the usual semiclassical contribution. We also compute the modifications to the Hawking temperature and Bekenstein-Hawking entropy for the Schwarzschild black hole. Finally, the coefficient of the logarithmic correction to entropy is shown to be related with the trace anomaly.

We show that the general solution of Chong, Cvetic̆, Lu and Pope for nonextremal rotating charged black holes in five-dimensional minimal gauged supergravity, or equivalently in the Einstein-Maxwell-Chern-Simons theory with a negative cosmological constant and with the Chern-Simons coefficient $\nu =1$, admits a simple description in a Kerr-Schild type framework with two scalar functions. Next, assuming this framework as an ansatz, we obtain new analytic solutions for slowly rotating charged black holes in the Einstein-Maxwell-Chern-Simons theory with $\nu \ne 1$. Using a covariant superpotential derived from Noether identities within the Katz-Bičák-Lynden-Bell approach, we calculate the mass and angular momenta for the general supergravity solution as well as for the slowly rotating solution with two independent rotation parameters. For the latter case, we also calculate the gyromagnetic ratios and obtain simple analytic formulas, involving both the parameters of the black holes and the Chern-Simons coefficient.