Previous work has shown that optomechanical force sensing can be used for efficient detection of ultralight (sub-eV) dark matter candidates. We propose to extend the reach of this method to the search for ultralight dark matter in gravitationally bound configurations in the Milky Way. We consider three scenarios, each strongly motivated by previous studies: boson stars traveling in the galaxy with virial velocity; a bosonic halo centered around the Sun (a “solar halo”); and a bosonic halo centered around the Earth. For each case, we consider bound states composed of either scalar particles with a Yukawa coupling, or vector particles coupled to baryon minus lepton number charge. Accounting for all experimental constraints on coupling strength, we estimate the sensitivity reach of an optomechanical sensor search. We conclude that, although boson star encounters with Earth would be too infrequent to be detected in the relevant parameter space, current optomechanical force sensing technologies provide promising search capabilities for solar or Earth-bound halos.

We conduct a systematic study of the electromagnetic properties of multiquark systems with undetermined internal structures. Motivated by the recent observation of the $T_{cc}^{+}$ state, we apply the light-cone version of the QCD sum rule method to extract the magnetic dipole moments of several possible doubly charmed vector tetraquark states. When analyzing the magnetic dipole moment of these states, they are modeled to have the diquark-antidiquark configurations. The magnetic dipole moments for the members are extracted as ${\mu }_{T_{cc\overline{u}\overline{d}}}=1.17_{-0.32}^{+0.44}{\mu }_N$, ${\mu }_{T_{cc\overline{u}\overline{s}}}=1.35_{-0.37}^{+0.50}{\mu }_N$, ${\mu }_{T_{cc\overline{d}\overline{s}}}=-2.69_{-0.75}^{+1.02}{\mu }_N$, ${\mu }_{T_{cc\overline{u}\overline{u}}}=1.33_{-0.40}^{+0.56}{\mu }_N$, ${\mu }_{T_{cc\overline{d}\overline{d}}}=1.41_{-0.43}^{+0.57}{\mu }_N$, and ${\mu }_{T_{cc\overline{s}\overline{s}}}=1.44_{-0.41}^{+0.53}{\mu }_N$. Comparing the results obtained for the magnetic dipole moments of the $T_{cc\overline{u}\overline{d}}$ state with the $T_{cc\overline{u}\overline{s}}$ state, the $U$ symmetry is seen to be broken at about 15%, while, for the $T_{cc\overline{d}\overline{d}}$ and $T_{cc\overline{s}\overline{s}}$ states, this symmetry is minimally broken. The obtained results may be useful to determine the true nature of these new interesting states.

We present computation of the next-to-leading power corrections for Higgs plus one jet production in a hadron collider via gluon fusion channel. Shifting of spinors in the helicity amplitudes without additional radiation captures the leading next-to-soft radiative behavior and makes the calculation tractable. We establish the connection between the shifted dipole spinors and the color ordered radiative amplitudes. We find that next-to-maximal helicity violating amplitudes do not play a role in this correction. Compact analytic expressions of next-to-leading power leading logarithms coming from different helicity configurations are shown.

Within a $2+1$ flavor Nambu–Jona-Lasinio model, we calculate the curvature coefficients and check them against available lattice QCD estimations. With the observation that the flavor mixing due to the ‘t Hooft determinant term significantly affects the ${\kappa }_2^S$, we explore the effect of ${\mu }_S$ on the $T-{\mu }_B$ crossover lines. With the novel determination of negative ${\kappa }_2^B$ at large ${\mu }_S$, we advocate the importance of studying the same in lattice QCD.

We compute the suppression of bottomonium in the quark-gluon plasma using the three-loop QCD static potential. The potential describes the spin-averaged bottomonium spectrum below threshold with a less than 1% error. Within potential nonrelativistic quantum chromodynamics and an open quantum systems framework, we compute the evolution of the bottomonium density matrix. The values of the quarkonium transport coefficients are obtained from lattice QCD measurements of the bottomonium in-medium width and thermal mass shift; we additionally include for the first time a vacuum contribution to the dispersive coefficient $\gamma$. Using the three-loop potential and the values of the heavy quarkonium transport coefficients, we find that the resulting bottomonium nuclear modification factor is consistent with experimental observations, while at the same time reproducing the lattice measurements of the in-medium width.

We report a search for a heavy neutral lepton (HNL) that mixes predominantly with ${\nu }_{\tau }$. The search utilizes data collected with the Belle detector at the KEKB asymmetric energy $e^{+}{e}^{-}$ collider. The data sample was collected at and just below the center-of-mass energies of the $\mathrm{\Upsilon }(4S)$ and $\mathrm{\Upsilon }(5S)$ resonances and has an integrated luminosity of $915{\mathrm{fb}}^{-1}$, corresponding to $(836\pm 12)\times {10}^6$ $e^{+}{e}^{-}\to {\tau }^{+}{\tau }^{-}$ events. We search for production of the HNL (denoted $N$) in the decay ${\tau }^{-}\to {\pi }^{-}N$ followed by its decay via $N\to {\mu }^{+}{\mu }^{-}{\nu }_{\tau }$. The search focuses on the parameter-space region in which the HNL is long-lived, so that the ${\mu }^{+}{\mu }^{-}$ originate from a common vertex that is significantly displaced from the collision point of the KEKB beams. Consistent with the expected background yield, one event is observed in the data sample after application of all the event-selection criteria. We report limits on the mixing parameter of the HNL with the $\tau$ neutrino as a function of the HNL mass.

We compute the time evolution of the nonequilibrium entropy in the homogeneous isotropization dynamics of the 1 R-Charge Black Hole model, which has a critical point in its conformal phase diagram defined at finite temperature and R-charge density. We also evaluate the time evolution of the pressure anisotropy and the scalar condensate of the medium. We disclose a new feature (not present in the Bjorken flow dynamics analyzed in previous works), which is observed for all the analyzed initial data: the formation of a periodic sequence of several close plateaus in the form of a stairway for the entropy density near thermodynamic equilibrium. We find that the period of plateau formation in the stairway is half the period of oscillations of the slowest quasinormal mode of the system, which is therefore strongly tied to the late-time dissipative dynamics of the system associated with the irreversibility of entropy production. For the particular case of the purely thermal Supersymmetric Yang-Mills plasma at zero density and vanishing scalar condensate, we find that the period of the stairway is half the period of oscillations of the slowest quasinormal mode associated with the late-time equilibration of the pressure anisotropy of the fluid, while at finite chemical potential the slowest quasinormal mode of the system is associated with the late-time equilibration of the scalar condensate.

How complex is the structure of quantum geometry? In several approaches, the spacetime atoms are obtained by the $SU(2)$ intertwiner called quantum tetrahedron. The complexity of this construction has a concrete consequence in recent efforts to simulate such models and toward experimental demonstrations of quantum gravity effects. There are, therefore, both a computational and an experimental complexity inherent to this class of models. In this paper, we study this complexity under the lens of stabilizer entropy (SE). We calculate the SE of the gauge-invariant basis states and its average in the $SU(2)$-gauge invariant subspace. We find that the states of definite volume are singled out by the (near) maximal SE and give precise bounds to the verification protocols for experimental demonstrations on available quantum computers.

We present a new infinite class of non-Abelian, $6d$ supergravities with eight supercharges. These theories not only satisfy all known low-energy consistency conditions, such as being free of anomalies, but also evade the constraints arising from the consistency of string probes, even after assuming completeness of the Bogomol’nyi–Prasad–Sommerfield (BPS) spectrum. This demonstrates that some additional UV input or hitherto unknown IR condition is needed in order to be left with a finite landscape, as is generally anticipated from a theory of quantum gravity.

The ringdown portion of a binary black hole merger consists of a sum of modes, each containing an infinite number of tones that are exponentially damped sinusoids. In principle, these can be measured as gravitational-waves with observatories like LIGO/Virgo/KAGRA, however in practice it is unclear how many tones can be meaningfully resolved. We investigate the consistency and resolvability of the overtones of the quadrupolar $\ell =m=2$ mode by starting at late times when the gravitational waveform is expected to be well approximated by the $\ell mn=220$ tone alone. We present a Bayesian inference framework to measure the tones in numerical relativity data. We measure tones at different start times, checking for consistency: we classify a tone as stably recovered if and only if the 95% credible intervals for amplitude and phase at time $t$ overlap with the credible intervals at all subsequent times. We test a set of tones including the first four overtones of the fundamental mode and the 320 tone and find that the 220 and 221 tones can be measured consistently with the inclusion of additional overtones. The 222 tone measurements can be stabilized when we include the 223 tone, but only in a narrow time window, after which it is too weak to measure. The 223 tone recovery appears to be unstable, and does not become stable with the introduction of the 224 tone. We find that $N=3$ tones can be stably recovered simultaneously. However, when analyzing $N\ge 4$ tones, the amplitude of one tone is consistent with zero. Thus, within our framework, one can identify only $N=3$ tones with nonzero amplitude that are simultaneously stable.

In the aftermath of a binary black hole merger event, the gravitational wave signal emitted by the remnant black hole is modeled as a superposition of damped sinusoids known as quasinormal modes. While the dominant quasinormal modes originating from linear black hole perturbation theory have been studied extensively in this postmerger “ringdown” phase, more accurate models of ringdown radiation include the nonlinear modes arising from higher-order perturbations of the remnant black hole spacetime. We explore the detectability of quadratic quasinormal modes with both ground- and space-based next-generation detectors. We quantify how predictions of the quadratic mode detectability depend on the quasinormal mode starting times. We then calculate the signal-to-noise ratio of quadratic modes for several detectors and binary black hole populations, focusing on the ($220\times 220$) mode—i.e., on the quadratic term sourced by the square of the linear (220) mode. For the events with the loudest quadratic mode signal-to-noise ratios, we additionally compute statistical errors on the mode parameters in order to further ascertain the distinguishability of the quadratic mode from the linear quasinormal modes. The astrophysical models used in this paper suggest that while the quadratic mode may be detectable in at most a few events with ground-based detectors, the prospects for detection with the Laser Interferometer Space Antenna (LISA) are more optimistic.

Modeling the gravitational wave signal from binaries beyond comparable mass is an important open issue in gravitational wave astronomy. For nonspinning binaries and when the spins are aligned with the orbital angular momentum, some first studies concerning the transition between the comparable and extreme mass ratio regime are already available, which suggest that extreme mass ratio results at times extrapolate to comparable mass ratios with surprising precision. Here we study the case of misaligned spins: We present new numerical relativity (NR) simulations performed with the einstein toolkit code at mass ratios up to 18 and construct a heterogeneous dataset that spans all mass ratios, including data from NR simulations, numerical approximations to extreme mass ratio binaries, and data from the geodesic approximation. As a first application we provide fits for the remnant mass and spin magnitude in single spin precessing systems, omitting consideration of the in-plane spin orientation. These fits demonstrate accuracy comparable to the state-of-the-art NRSur7dq4EmriRemnant model, all while retaining the simplicity and efficiency inherent in previous phenomenological fits.

A fully relativistic three-dimensional Cauchy-characteristic matching (CCM) algorithm is implemented for physical degrees of freedom in a numerical relativity code spectre. The method is free of approximations and can be applied to any physical system. We test the algorithm with various scenarios involving smooth data, including the propagation of Teukolsky waves within a flat background, the perturbation of a Kerr black hole with a Teukolsky wave, and the injection of a gravitational-wave pulse from the characteristic grid. Our investigations reveal no numerical instabilities in the simulations. In addition, the tests indicate that the CCM algorithm effectively directs characteristic information into the inner Cauchy system, yielding higher precision in waveforms and smaller violations of Bondi-gauge constraints, especially when the outer boundary of the Cauchy evolution is at a smaller radius.

We investigate black holes and gravitational perturbations when both the scalar Gauss-Bonnet and dynamical Chern-Simons gravity sectors coexist in addition to the Einstein-Hilbert term, and both sectors are coupled to a single canonically normalized scalar field. The presence of the scalar Gauss-Bonnet gravity sector allows the scalar field to possess a nonvanishing background solution, resulting in additional couplings between odd and even-type gravitational perturbations arising from the dynamical Chern-Simons gravity sector. We illustrate the impact of these even-odd gravitational couplings in gravitational perturbations around a static spherically symmetric black hole. Although the couplings between the odd and even-type gravitational perturbations are known to appear in purely tensorial gravity theories with higher-curvature corrections, we demonstrate it in scalar-tensor theories.

The Galileon theory is a prototypical effective field theory that incorporates the Vainshtein screening mechanism—a feature that arises in some extensions of general relativity, such as massive gravity. The Vainshtein effect requires that the theory contain higher order derivative interactions, which results in Galileons, and theories like them, failing to be technically well posed. While this is not a fundamental issue when the theory is correctly treated as an effective field theory, it nevertheless poses significant practical problems when numerically simulating this model. These problems can be tamed using a number of different approaches: introducing an active low-pass filter and/or constructing a UV completion at the level of the equations of motion, which controls the high momentum modes. These methods have been tested on cubic Galileon interactions, and have been shown to reproduce the correct low-energy behavior. Here we show how the numerical UV-completion method can be applied to quartic Galileon interactions, and present the first simulations of the quartic Galileon model using this technique. We demonstrate that our approach can probe physics in the regime of the effective field theory in which the quartic term dominates, while successfully reproducing the known results for cubic interactions.

We analyze cosmic microwave background (CMB) data to constrain the mass and interaction strengths of thermally-produced dark matter (DM) in a self-consistent manner, simultaneously taking into account the cosmological effects of its mass and interactions. The presence of a light thermal-relic particle contributes non-negligibly to the radiation density during big bang nucleosynthesis (BBN), altering the light-element yields, as well as the effective number of relativistic particle species. On the other hand, DM interactions with the Standard Model can affect distribution of matter in later universe. Both mass and interactions alter CMB anisotropy on subdegree scales. To understand and quantify the interplay of these effects, we consider elastic DM-baryon scattering with a momentum-transfer cross section that scales as a power law of the relative velocity between the scattering particles. In the range of thermal-relic DM masses relevant for BBN ($\lesssim 20\mathrm{MeV}$), we find that the reconstruction of the DM mass and the scattering cross section from the CMB data features strong degeneracies; modeling the two effects simultaneously increases the sensitivity of the CMB measurements to both fundamental properties of DM. Additionally, we study the effects of late-time residual annihilation of a light thermal relic and provide improved CMB constraints on the DM mass and annihilation cross section. To examine degeneracy between DM mass, cross section for elastic scattering with baryons, and annihilation cross section, we consider a specific case of DM with electric and magnetic dipole moments. We present new self-consistent cosmological bounds for this model and discuss implications for future searches.

We investigate entanglement generation between the sub- and super-Hubble modes of inflaton fluctuations, in the context of particle production from perturbations during inflation. We consider a large-field inflationary scenario where inflation is driven by a vacuum energy symmetry breaking potential and the scalar inflaton field is nonminimally coupled to spacetime curvature. In particular, we focus on the slow-roll phase, adopting a quasi–de Sitter scale factor to properly account for the presence of perturbations and computing the pair production probability associated with the coupling between the inflaton and spacetime inhomogeneities. The interaction Lagrangian at first order is constructed from inhomogeneities induced by the inflaton dynamics, and the initial Bunch-Davies vacuum state of the field evolves under the action of such Lagrangian. In this framework, we quantify the total amount of entanglement via the von Neumann entropy of the reduced density operator for superhorizon modes, tracing out sub-Hubble degrees of freedom. We then compare these outcomes with entanglement production for quadratic chaotic inflation and for a small-field quadratic hilltop scenario, preserving field-curvature coupling in both cases and pointing out the main differences between large- and small-field approaches. We show that the amount of entanglement entropy arising from such geometric production grows rapidly in the slow-roll regime and that it is typically higher in large-field scenarios. We also discuss our outcomes in light of recent findings for the squeezing entropy of cosmological perturbations and cubic nonlinearities in de Sitter space.

Lensing reconstruction maps from the cosmic microwave background (CMB) provide direct observations of the matter distribution of the universe without the use of a biased tracer. Such maps, however, constitute projected observables along the line of sight that are dominated by their low-redshift contributions. To cleanly access high-redshift information, Maniyar et al., [Phys. Rev. D 105, 083509 (2022)] showed that a linear combination of lensing maps from both CMB and line intensity mapping (LIM) observations can exactly null the low-redshift contribution to CMB lensing convergence. In this paper we explore the scientific returns of this nulling technique. We show that LIM-nulling estimators can place constraints on standard $\mathrm{\Lambda }\mathrm{CDM}$ plus neutrino mass parameters that are competitive with traditional CMB lensing. Additionally, we demonstrate that as a clean probe of the high-redshift universe, LIM nulling can be used for model-independent tests of cosmology beyond $\mathrm{\Lambda }\mathrm{CDM}$ and as a probe of the high-redshift matter power spectrum.

We study the cooling of isolated neutron stars, employing different nuclear equations of state with or without active direct Urca process, and investigate the interplay with the nuclear pairing gaps. We find that a consistent description of all current cooling data requires fast direct Urca cooling and reasonable proton 1S0 gaps, but no neutron 3P2 pairing. We then deduce the neutron star mass distributions compatible with the cooling analysis and compare with current theoretical models. Reduced 1S0 gaps and unimodal mass distributions are preferred by the analysis. The importance of statistical and systematic errors is also investigated.

The Galactic Center excess (GCE) remains an enduring mystery, with leading explanations being annihilating dark matter or an unresolved population of millisecond pulsars. Analyzing the morphology of the GCE provides critical clues to identify its exact origin. We investigate the robustness of the inferred GCE morphology against the effects of masking, an important step in the analysis where the gamma-ray emission from point sources and the galactic disk are excluded. Using different masks constructed from Fermi point source catalogs and a wavelet method, we find that the GCE morphology, particularly its ellipticity and cuspiness, is relatively independent of the choice of mask for energies above 2–3 GeV. The GCE morphology systematically favors an approximately spherical shape, as expected for dark matter annihilation. Compared to various stellar bulge profiles, a spherical dark matter annihilation profile better fits the data across different masks and galactic diffuse emission backgrounds, except for the stellar bulge profile from Coleman et al. Mon. Not. R. Astron. Soc. 495, 3350 (2020)., which provides a similar fit to the data. Modeling the GCE with two components, one from dark matter annihilation and one tracing the Coleman bulge, we find this two-component model outperforms any single component or combinations of dark matter annihilation and other stellar bulge profiles. Uncertainty remains about the exact fraction contributed by each component across different background models and masks. However, when the Coleman bulge dominates, its corresponding spectrum lacks characteristics typically associated with millisecond pulsars, suggesting that it mostly models the emission from other sources instead of the GCE that is still present and spherically symmetric.