We present the results of indirect searches for Weakly Interacting Massive Particles (WIMPs), with 1679.6 live days of data from the Super-Kamiokande detector using neutrino-induced upward through-going muons. The search is performed by looking for an excess of high energy muon neutrinos from WIMP annihilations in the Sun, the core of the Earth, and the Galactic Center, as compared to the number expected from the atmospheric neutrino background. No statistically significant excess was seen. We calculate the flux limits in various angular cones around each of the above celestial objects. We obtain conservative model-independent upper limits on the WIMP-nucleon cross section as a function of WIMP mass, and compare these results with the corresponding results from direct dark matter detection experiments.

We derive the exact relationship, including all nonlinearities, between real-space and redshift-space two-point statistics through the pairwise velocity distribution function. We show using numerical simulations that the pairwise velocity probability distribution function is strongly non-Gaussian at all scales and explain why this is so. We caution that a commonly used ansatz to model the redshift-space power spectrum gives rise to an unphysical distribution of pairwise velocities, and show that it is in general impossible to derive the distribution from measurements of redshift-space clustering. Methods that claim to do this obtain instead something else, whose properties we derive. We provide a general derivation of the large-scale limit of the redshift-space power spectrum and show that it differs from the Kaiser formula by terms that depend on Gaussian and non-Gaussian contributions to the velocity dispersion of large-scale flows. We also show that the large-scale evolution of velocity fields is not well described by linear theory and discuss how this impacts the redshift-space power spectrum. Finally, we stress that using the monopole of the redshift-space power as an indicator of the real-space power spectrum shape can lead to systematic effects in the determination of cosmological parameters; nevertheless a simple procedure is able to recover the large-scale real-space power spectrum rather well.

We study the scaling behavior of the step scaling function for SU(3) gauge theory, employing the renormalization-group improved Iwasaki gauge action and the perturbatively improved Lüscher-Weisz gauge action. We confirm that the step scaling functions from the improved gauge actions agree with that previously obtained from the plaquette action within errors in the continuum limit at both weak and strong coupling regions. We also investigate how different choices of boundary counterterms for the improved gauge actions affect the scaling behavior. In the extrapolation to the continuum limit, we observe that the cutoff dependence becomes moderate for the Iwasaki action, if a perturbative reduction of scaling violations is applied to the simulation results. We also measure the low energy scale ratio with the Iwasaki action and confirm its universality.

The $\Delta S=2$ transition $b\to ss\overline{d}$ is extremely small in the standard model, proceeding only via box diagrams. Such decays are thus an appropriate ground for searching new physics. We present a study of several two-body and three-body decays of the $B_c$ meson belonging to this class. Our calculation covers the minimal supersymmetric model with and without $\mathcal{R}$-parity and a two-Higgs-doublet model. The current limits on the parameters of these models allow for rather large branching ratios for several two- and three-body hadronic decay modes of $B_c$, up to the ${10}^{-4}$ range in the minimal supersymmetric model with $\mathcal{R}$-parity violation.

A possible interplay of both terms in the type II seesaw formula is illustrated by presenting a novel way to generate deviations from exact bimaximal neutrino mixing. In the type II seesaw mechanism with dominance of the noncanonical $\mathrm{S}\mathrm{U}(2{)}_L$ triplet term, the conventional seesaw term can naturally give a small contribution to the neutrino mass matrix. Nevertheless, if the triplet term corresponds to the bimaximal mixing scheme in the normal hierarchy, the small contribution of the conventional seesaw term naturally generates nonmaximal solar neutrino mixing. Atmospheric neutrino mixing is also reduced from maximal, corresponding to $1-{sin}^{2}2{\theta }_{23}$ of order 0.01. Also, small but nonvanishing $U_{e3}$ of order 0.001 is obtained. It is also possible that the $\Delta m^2$ responsible for solar neutrino oscillations is induced by the small conventional seesaw term. Larger deviations from zero $U_{e3}$ and from maximal atmospheric neutrino mixing are then expected. This scenario links the small ratio of the solar and atmospheric $\Delta m^2$ with the deviation from maximal solar neutrino mixing. We comment on leptogenesis in this scenario and compare the contributions to the decay asymmetry of the heavy Majorana neutrinos as induced by themselves and by the triplet.

We identify a class of point-particle models that exhibit a target-space duality. This duality arises from a construction based on supersymmetric quantum mechanics with a nonvanishing central charge. Motivated by analogies to string theory, we are led to speculate regarding mechanisms for restricting the background geometry.

We present a formalism for constructing quasiequilibrium binary black hole initial data suitable for numerical evolution. We construct quasiequilibrium models by imposing an approximate helical Killing symmetry appropriate for quasicircular orbits. We use the sum of two Kerr-Schild metrics as our background metric, thereby improving on conformal flat backgrounds that do not accommodate rotating black holes and providing a horizon-penetrating lapse, convenient for implementing black hole excision. We set inner boundary conditions at an excision radius well inside the apparent horizon and construct these boundary conditions to incorporate the quasiequilibrium condition and recover the solution for isolated black holes in the limit of large separation. We use our formalism both to generate initial data for binary black hole evolutions and to construct a crude quasiequilibrium, inspiral sequence for binary black holes of fixed irreducible mass.

Even if nonadiabatic perturbations are generated in multifield inflation, the perturbations will become adiabatic if the Universe after inflation enters an era of local thermal equilibrium, with no nonzero conserved quantities, and will remain adiabatic as long as the wavelength is outside the horizon, even when local thermal equilibrium no longer applies. Small initial nonadiabatic perturbations associated with imperfect local thermal equilibrium remain small when baryons are created from out-of-equilibrium decay of massive particles, or when dark matter particles go out of local thermal equilibrium.

We describe an efficient and exact method that enables global Bayesian analysis of cosmic microwave background (CMB) data. The method reveals the joint posterior density (or likelihood for flat priors) of the power spectrum $C_{\ell }$ and the CMB signal. Foregrounds and instrumental parameters can be simultaneously inferred from the data. The method allows the specification of a wide range of foreground priors. We explicitly show how to propagate the non-Gaussian dependency structure of the $C_{\ell }$ posterior through to the posterior density of the parameters. If desired, the analysis can be coupled to theoretical (cosmological) priors and can yield the posterior density of cosmological parameter estimates directly from the time-ordered data. The method does not hinge on special assumptions about the survey geometry or noise properties, etc., It is based on a Monte Carlo approach and hence parallelizes trivially. No trace or determinant evaluations are necessary. The feasibility of this approach rests on the ability to solve the systems of linear equations which arise. These are of the same size and computational complexity as the map-making equations. We describe a preconditioned conjugate gradient technique that solves this problem and demonstrate in a numerical example that the computational time required for each Monte Carlo sample scales as $n_p^{3/2}$ with the number of pixels $n_p$. We use our method to analyze the data from the Differential Microwave Radiometer on the Cosmic Background Explorer and explore the non-Gaussian joint posterior density of the $C_{\ell }$ from the Differential Microwave Radiometer on the Cosmic Background Explorer in several projections.

Detecting dark energy dynamics is the main quest of current dark energy research. Addressing the issue demands a fully consistent analysis of cosmic microwave background, large-scale structure and SN-Ia data with multiparameter freedom valid for all redshifts. Here we undertake a ten parameter analysis of general dark energy confronted with the first year Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe, 2dF galaxy survey and latest SN-Ia data. Despite the huge freedom in dark energy dynamics there are no new degeneracies with standard cosmic parameters apart from a mild degeneracy between reionization and the redshift of acceleration, both of which effectively suppress small scale power. Breaking this degeneracy will help significantly in detecting dynamics, if it exists. Our best-fit model to the data has significant late-time evolution at $z<1.5$. Phantom models are also considered and we find that the best-fit crosses $w=-1$ which, if confirmed, would be a clear signal for radically new physics. Treatment of such rapidly varying models requires careful integration of the dark energy density usually not implemented in standard codes, leading to crucial errors of up to 5%. Nevertheless cosmic variance means that standard $\Lambda$ cold dark matter models are still a very good fit to the data and evidence for dynamics is currently very weak. Independent tests of reionization or the epoch of acceleration (e.g., integrated Sachs-Wolfe–large scale structure correlations) or reduction of cosmic variance at large scales (e.g., cluster polarization at high redshift) may prove key in the hunt for dynamics.

We obtain the general solution for nonextremal 3-charge dilatonic rotating black holes in the five dimensional $\mathrm{U}(1{)}^3$ gauged $\mathcal{N}=2$ supergravity coupled to two vector multiplets, in the case where the two rotation parameters are set equal. These solutions encompass all the previously-known extremal solutions, and, by setting the three charges equal, the recently-obtained nonextremal solutions of $\mathcal{N}=2$ gauged five dimensional pure supergravity.

We study how we can understand the change of the spectral function and the pole location of the correlation function for sigma at finite temperature, which were previously obtained in the linear sigma model with a resummation technique called optimized perturbation theory. There are two relevant poles in the sigma channel. One pole is the original sigma pole which shows up as a broad peak at zero temperature and becomes lighter as the temperature increases. The behavior is understood from the decreasing of the sigma condensate, which is consistent with the Brown-Rho scaling. The other pole changes from a virtual state to a bound state of $\pi \pi$ as the temperature increases which causes the enhancement at the $\pi \pi$ threshold. The behavior is understood as the emergence of the $\pi \pi$ bound state due to the enhancement of the $\pi \pi$ attraction by the induced emission in medium. The latter pole, not the former, eventually degenerates with pion above the critical temperature of the chiral transition. This means that the observable “$\sigma$” changes from the former to the latter pole, which can be interpreted as the level crossing of $\sigma$ and $\pi \pi$ at finite temperature.

We present a quenched lattice QCD calculation of spin-$1/2$ five-quark states with $uudd\overline{s}$ quark content for both positive and negative parities. We do not observe any bound pentaquark state in these channels for either $I=0$ or $I=1$. The states we found are consistent with $KN$ scattering states which are checked to exhibit the expected volume dependence of the spectral weight. The results are based on overlap-fermion propagators on two lattices, ${12}^3\times 28$ and ${16}^3\times 28$, with the same lattice spacing of 0.2 fm, and pion mass as low as $\sim 180\mathrm{M}\mathrm{e}\mathrm{V}$.

The hadron-energy evolution (Collins and Soper) equation for all the leading-twist transverse-momentum and spin dependent parton distributions is derived in the impact parameter space. Based on this equation, we present a resummation formulas for the spin dependent structure functions of the semi-inclusive deep-inelastic scattering.

The transverse momentum distribution of soft hadrons and jets that accompany central hard-scattering production at hadron colliders is of great importance, since it has a direct bearing on the ability to separate new-physics signals from Standard Model backgrounds. We compare the predictions for the gluonic $k_t$–distribution using two different approaches: resummed Next-to-Leading-Logarithm (NLL) Balitsky-Fadin-Kuraev-Lipatov (BFKL) and Dokshitzer-Gribov-Lipatov-Altarelli-Parisi (DGLAP) evolution. We find that as long as the initial and final virtualities ($k_t$) along the emission chain are not too close to each other, the NLL resummed BFKL results do not differ significantly from those obtained using standard DGLAP evolution. The saturation momentum $Q_s(x)$, calculated within the resummed BFKL approach, grows with $1/x$ even slower than in the leading-order DGLAP case.

The Higgs boson may decay mainly to an invisible mode characterized by missing energy, instead of the standard model channels. This is a generic feature of many models where neutrino masses arise from the spontaneous breaking of ungauged lepton number at relatively low scales, such as spontaneously broken $R$-parity models. Taking these models as framework, we reanalyze this striking suggestion in view of the recent data on neutrino oscillations that indicate nonzero neutrino masses. We show that, despite the smallness of neutrino masses, the Higgs boson can decay mainly to the invisible Goldstone boson associated to the spontaneous breaking of lepton number. This requires a gauge singlet superfield coupling to the electroweak doublet Higgses, as in the next to minimal supersymmetric standard model scenario for solving the $\mu$ problem. The search for invisibly decaying Higgs bosons should be taken into account in the planning of future accelerators, such as the Large Hadron Collider and the Next Linear Collider.

We conjecture that three light Majorana neutrinos and their right-handed counterparts may have a universal geometric mass hierarchy. Incorporating this phenomenological conjecture with the Fritzsch texture of lepton mass matrices in a simple seesaw mechanism, we show that it is possible to simultaneously account for current neutrino oscillation data and the cosmological baryon number asymmetry via leptogenesis.

We construct the quantum oscillator interacting with a constant magnetic field on complex projective spaces $\mathbb{C}{\mathrm{P}}^{\mathrm{N}}$, as well as on their noncompact counterparts, i.e., the $N$-dimensional Lobachewski spaces ${\mathcal{L}}_N$. We find the spectrum of this system and the complete basis of wave functions. Surprisingly, the inclusion of a magnetic field does not yield any qualitative change in the energy spectrum. For $N>1$ the magnetic field does not break the superintegrability of the system, whereas for $N=1$ it preserves the exact solvability of the system. We extend these results to the cones constructed over $\mathbb{C}{\mathrm{P}}^{\mathrm{N}}$ and ${\mathcal{L}}_N$, and perform the Kustaanheimo-Stiefel transformation of these systems to the three dimensional Coulomb-like systems.