We propose a realization of inverted hybrid inflation scenario in the context of $n=2\mathrm{}$ supersymmetric quantum cosmology. The spectrum of density fluctuations is calculated in the de Sitter regimen as a function of the gravitino and the Planck mass, and explicit forms for the wave function of the Universe are found in the WKB regimen for FRW closed and flat universes.

We present a complete analysis of the fermion masses and mixing matrices in the framework of the little flavon model. In this model textures are generated by coupling the fermions to scalar fields, the little flavons, that are pseudo Goldstone bosons of the breaking of a global $\mathrm{SU}\left(6\right)\mathrm{}$ symmetry. The Yukawa couplings arise from the vacuum expectation values of the flavon fields, their sizes controlled by a potential in the manner of Coleman and Weinberg. Quark and lepton mass hierarchies and mixing angles are accommodated within the effective approach in a natural manner.

The minimal supersymmetric standard model has a truly supersymmetric way of explaining both the baryon asymmetry and cold dark matter in the present Universe: that is, “Affleck-Dine baryo/DM genesis.” The associated late-time decay of Q balls directly connects the origins of the baryon asymmetry and dark matter, and also predicts a specific nature of the LSP. In this paper, we investigate the prospects for indirect detection of these dark matter candidates observing the high-energy neutrino flux from the Sun and hard positron flux from the halo. We also update the previous analysis of the direct detection of Fujii and Hamaguchi [Phys. Rev. D 66, 083501 (2002)] by implementing the recent results from the WMAP satellite.

The three-loop nonmixing contributions to the anomalous dimension of the leading order quark pair production current in nonrelativistic QCD are computed. It is demonstrated that the renormalization procedure can only be carried out consistently if the dynamics of both soft and ultrasoft degrees of freedom is present for all scales below the heavy quark mass and if the soft and ultrasoft renormalization scales are always correlated.

We propose a flexible and model independent parametrization of the neutrino mixing matrix, which takes advantage of the fact that there are up to three small quantities in neutrino mixing phenomenology: (i) the deviation from maximal mixing of solar neutrinos, (ii) the mixing matrix element $U_{e3\mathrm{}},$ and (iii) the deviation from maximal mixing of atmospheric neutrinos. It is possible to quantify those three observations with a parameter $\lambda \sim 0.2,$ which appears at least linearly in all elements of the mixing matrix. The limit $\overrightarrow{\lambda }0$ corresponds to exact bimaximal mixing. Present and future experiments can be used to pin down the power of $\lambda$ required to usefully describe the observed phenomenology. Observing that the ratio of the two measured mass squared differences is roughly ${\lambda }^2$ allows us to further study the structure of the Majorana mass matrix. We comment on the implications of this parametrization for neutrinoless double beta decay and on the oscillation probabilities in long-baseline experiments.

Astrophysical sources of ultrahigh energy neutrinos yield tau neutrino fluxes due to neutrino oscillations. We study in detail the contribution of tau neutrinos with energies above ${10}^6\mathrm{GeV}$ relative to the contribution of the other flavors. We consider several different initial neutrino fluxes and include tau neutrino regeneration in transit through the Earth and the energy loss of charged leptons. We discuss the signals of tau neutrinos in detectors such as IceCube, RICE, and ANITA.

We present the first experimental results based on the jet boost algorithm, a technique to select unbiased samples of gluon jets in $e^{+}{e}^{-}$ annihilations, i.e. gluon jets free of biases introduced by event selection or jet finding criteria. Our results are derived from hadronic $Z^0$ decays observed with the OPAL detector at the LEP $e^{+}{e}^{-}$ collider at CERN. First, we test the boost algorithm through studies with HERWIG Monte Carlo events and find that it provides accurate measurements of the charged particle multiplicity distributions of unbiased gluon jets for jet energies larger than about 5 GeV, and of the jet particle energy spectra (fragmentation functions) for jet energies larger than about 14 GeV. Second, we apply the boost algorithm to our data to derive unbiased measurements of the gluon jet multiplicity distribution for energies between about 5 and 18 GeV, and of the gluon jet fragmentation function at 14 and 18 GeV. In conjunction with our earlier results at 40 GeV, we then test QCD calculations for the energy evolution of the distributions, specifically the mean and first two nontrivial normalized factorial moments of the multiplicity distribution, and the fragmentation function. The theoretical results are found to be in global agreement with the data, although the factorial moments are not well described for jet energies below about 14 GeV.

A narrow state, which we label $D_{\mathrm{sJ}}{\mathrm{}\left(2458\right)\mathrm{}}^{+},$ with a mass $2458.0\pm 1.0\left(\mathrm{stat}\right)\pm 1.0\left(\mathrm{syst}\right)\mathrm{MeV}{/c}^2,$ is observed in the inclusive $D_s^{+}{\pi }^0\gamma$ mass distribution in $91{\mathrm{fb}}^{-1}$ of $e^{+}{e}^{-}$ annihilation data recorded by the BABAR detector at the SLAC PEP-II asymmetric-energy $e^{+}{e}^{-}$ storage ring. The observed width is consistent with the experimental resolution. The data favor decay through $D_s^{*}{\mathrm{}\left(2112\right)\mathrm{}}^{+}{\pi }^0$ rather than through $D_{\mathrm{sJ}}^{*}{\mathrm{}\left(2317\right)\mathrm{}}^{+}\gamma .$ An analysis of $D_s^{+}{\pi }^0$ data accounting for the influence of the $D_{\mathrm{sJ}}{\mathrm{}\left(2458\right)\mathrm{}}^{+}$ produces a $D_{\mathrm{sJ}}^{*}{\mathrm{}\left(2317\right)\mathrm{}}^{+}$ mass of $2317.3\pm 0.4\left(\mathrm{stat}\right)\pm 0.8\left(\mathrm{syst}\right)\mathrm{MeV}{/c}^2.$

We consider the Hamiltonian BRST quantization of a noncommutative non-Abelian gauge theory. The Seiberg-Witten map of all phase-space variables, including multipliers, ghosts, and their momenta, is given in first order in the noncommutative parameter $\theta .$ We show that there exists a complete consistency between the gauge structures of the original and mapped theories, derived in a canonical way, once we appropriately choose the map solutions.

The predictions of our previous analysis about possible low-mass ${(m}_{\chi }\lesssim 50\mathrm{GeV})$ relic neutralinos are discussed in the light of some recent results from WIMP direct detection experiments. It is proved that these light neutralinos are quite compatible with the new annual-modulation data of the DAMA Collaboration; our theoretical predictions are also compared with the upper bounds of the CDMS and EDELWEISS Collaborations.

Mirror atoms are expected to be a significant component of the galactic dark matter halo if mirror matter is identified with the nonbaryonic dark matter in the Universe. Mirror matter can interact with ordinary matter via gravity and via the photon-mirror photon kinetic mixing interaction—causing mirror charged particles to couple to ordinary photons with an effective electric charge $\epsilon e.\mathrm{}$ This means that the nuclei of mirror atoms can elastically scatter off the nuclei of ordinary atoms, leading to nuclear recoils, which can be detected in existing dark matter experiments. We show that the dark matter experiments most sensitive to this type of dark matter candidate (via the nuclear recoil signature) are the DAMA/NaI and CRESST/Sapphire experiments. Furthermore, we show that the impressive annual modulation signal obtained by the DAMA/NaI experiment can be explained by mirror matter-type dark matter for $|\epsilon |\sim 5\times {10}^{-9}$ and is supported by DAMA’s absolute rate measurement as well as the CRESST/Sapphire data. This value of $|\epsilon |$ is consistent with the value obtained from various solar system anomalies including the Pioneer spacecraft anomaly, anomalous meteorite events and lack of small craters on the asteroid Eros. It is also consistent with standard big bang nucleosynthesis.

We calculate the cross section for $e^{+}{e}^{-}\to H^{+}{e}^{-}\overline{\nu }$ in the two-Higgs-doublet model from one-loop diagrams involving top and bottom quarks. This process offers the possibility of producing the charged Higgs boson at the $e^{+}{e}^{-}$ collider when its mass is more than half the center-of-mass energy, so that charged Higgs pair production is kinematically forbidden. The cross section receives contributions from both s-channel and t-channel processes; the s-channel contribution dominates for center-of-mass energies of 1 TeV and below. About 80% of the s-channel contribution comes from the resonant process $e^{+}{e}^{-}\to H^{+}{W}^{-},$ with $W^{-}\to e^{-}\overline{\nu }.$ The cross section is generally small, below 0.01 fb for $\tan \beta >2,$ and falls with increasing $\tan \beta .$

We study the scalar condensate and the topological susceptibility for a continuous range of quark masses in the Schwinger model with $N_f=0,1,2\mathrm{}$ dynamical flavors, using both the overlap and the staggered discretization. At finite lattice spacing the differences between the two formulations become rather dramatic near the chiral limit, but they get severely reduced, at the coupling considered, after a few smearing steps.

We study a multilocalization model for charged leptons and neutrinos, including the possibility of a seesaw mechanism. This framework offers the opportunity to allow for realistic solutions in a consistent model without fine-tuning of parameters, even if quarks are also considered. Those solutions predict that the large Majorana mass eigenvalues for right-handed neutrinos are of the same order of magnitude, although this almost common mass can span a large range (bounded from above by $\sim {10}^{12}\mathrm{GeV}).\mathrm{}$ The model also predicts Majorana masses between $\sim {10}^{-2}\mathrm{eV}$ and $\sim 5\times {10}^{-2}\mathrm{eV}$ for the left-handed neutrinos, both in the normal and inverted mass hierarchy cases. This mass interval corresponds to sensitivities which are reachable by proposed neutrinoless double $\beta$ decay experiments. The preferred range for leptonic mixing angle ${\theta }_{13}$ is ${10}^{-2}\lesssim \sin {\theta }_{13}\lesssim {10}^{-1},$ but smaller values are not totally excluded by the model.

We generalize the standard computation of homogeneous nucleation theory at zero temperature to a scenario in which the bubble shape is determined self-consistently with its quantum fluctuations. Studying two scalar models in 1+1 dimensions, we find the self-consistent bounce by employing a two-particle irreducible effective action in imaginary time at the level of the Hartree approximation. We thus obtain an effective single bounce action which determines the rate exponent. We use collective coordinates to account for the translational invariance and the growth instability of the bubble and finally present a new nucleation rate prefactor. We compare the results with those obtained using the standard 1-loop approximation and show that the self-consistent rate can differ by several orders of magnitude.

It is generally argued that the combined effect of the Heisenberg principle and general relativity leads to a minimum time uncertainty. Most of the analyses supporting this conclusion are based on a perturbative approach to quantization. We consider a simple family of gravitational models, including the Einstein-Rosen waves, in which the (nonlinearized) inclusion of gravity changes the normalization of time translations by a monotonic energy-dependent factor. In these circumstances, it is shown that a maximum time resolution emerges nonperturbatively only if the total energy is bounded. Perturbatively, however, there always exists a minimum uncertainty in the physical time.

Using the quasinormal mode frequency of extremal Reissner-Nordström black holes, we obtain the area spectrum for these types of black holes. We show that the area and entropy black hole horizon are equally spaced. Our results for the spacing of the area spectrum differ from that for Schwarzschild black holes.

In many astrophysical problems, it is important to understand the behavior of functions that come from rotating (Kerr) black hole orbits. It can be particularly useful to work with the frequency domain representation of those functions, in order to bring out their harmonic dependence upon the fundamental orbital frequencies of Kerr black holes. Although, as has recently been shown by Schmidt, such a frequency domain representation must exist, the coupled nature of a black hole orbit’s r and $\theta$ motions makes it difficult to construct such a representation in practice. Combining Schmidt’s description with a clever choice of timelike coordinate suggested by Mino, we have developed a simple procedure that sidesteps this difficulty. One first Fourier expands all quantities using Mino’s time parameter $\lambda .$ In particular, the observer’s time t is decomposed with $\lambda .$ The frequency domain description is then built from the λ-Fourier expansion and the expansion of t. We have found this procedure to be quite simple to implement, and to be applicable to a wide class of functionals. We test the procedure using a simple test function, and then apply it to a particularly interesting case, the Weyl curvature scalar ${\psi }_4$ used in black hole perturbation theory.

Five dimensional gravity coupled, both in the bulk and on a brane, to a scalar Liouville field yields a geometry confined to a strip around the brane and with time dependent scale factors for the four geometry. In various limits known models can be recovered as well as a temporally expanding four geometry with a warp factor falling exponentially away from the brane. The effective theory on the brane has a time dependent Planck mass and “cosmological constant.” Although the scale factor expands, the expansion is not an acceleration.

We develop a theoretical frame for the study of classical and quantum gravitational waves based on the properties of a nonlinear ordinary differential equation for a function $\sigma \left(\eta \right)$ of the conformal time $\eta ,$ called the auxiliary field equation. At the classical level, $\sigma \left(\eta \right)$ can be expressed by means of two independent solutions of the “master equation” to which the perturbed Einstein equations for the gravitational waves can be reduced. At the quantum level, all the significant physical quantities can be formulated using Bogolubov transformations and the operator quadratic Hamiltonian corresponding to the classical version of a damped parametrically excited oscillator where the varying mass is replaced by the square cosmological scale factor $a^2\left(\eta \right).\mathrm{}$ A quantum approach to the generation of gravitational waves is proposed on the grounds of the previous η-dependent Hamiltonian. An estimate in terms of $\sigma \left(\eta \right)$ and $a\left(\eta \right)$ of the destruction of quantum coherence due to the gravitational evolution and an exact expression for the phase of a gravitational wave corresponding to any value of $\eta$ are also obtained. We conclude by discussing a few applications to quasi–de Sitter and standard de Sitter scenarios.