Gravitational waves emitted from the binary neutron star (BNS) systems can carry information about the dense matter phase in these compact stars. The crust-core interfacial mode is an oscillation mode in a neutron star, and it depends mostly on the equation of state of the matter in the crust-core transition region. This mode can be resonantly excited by the tidal field of an inspiraling-in BNS system, thereby affecting the emitted gravitational waves and hence could be used to probe the equation of state in the crust-core transition region. In this work, we investigate, in detail, how the first-order phase transition inside the neutron star, if it exists, affects the properties of the crust-core interfacial mode using a Newtonian fluid perturbation theory on a general relativistic background solution of the stellar structure. Two possible types of phase transitions are considered: (1) the phase transitions happen in the fluid core but near the crust-core interface, which results in density discontinuities, and (2) the strong interaction phase transitions in the dense core (as in the conventional hybrid star case). We study how these phase transitions affect the properties of the neutron star oscillation mode excited at the interface, where there exists a shear modulus discontinuity (interfacial mode). In particular, the former phase transition has a minor effect on the mass-radius relation, and the adiabatic tidal deformability, but has the potential to significantly affect the interfacial mode frequency and thereby could be probed using gravitational waves. For the BNS systems, we discuss the possible observational signatures of these phase transitions in the gravitational waveforms and their detectability. Our work enriches the exploration of the physical properties of the crust-core interfacial mode and provides a promising method for probing the phase transition using the seismology of a compact star.

Observations of white dwarfs in dark matter-rich environments can provide strong limits on the strength of dark matter interactions. Here we apply the recently improved formalism of the dark matter capture rate in white dwarfs to a general model in which dark matter interacts with the white dwarf ion components via a light scalar mediator. We compute the dark matter capture rate in the optically thin limit in a cold white dwarf from the globular cluster Messier. We then estimate the threshold cross section, which significantly varies as a function of the light scalar mediator mass $m_{\varphi }$ in the range of $0.05m_{\chi }<m_{\varphi }<m_{\chi }$ and becomes constant when $m_{\varphi }>m_{\chi }$. We also show that the bounds obtained from the dark matter capture in a white dwarf from the globular cluster Messier 4 are complementary to direct detection experiments and particularly strong in the sub-GeV regime.

The type II seesaw model remains a popular and viable explanation of neutrino masses and mixing angles. By hypothesizing the existence of a scalar that is a triplet under the weak gauge interaction, the model predicts strong correlations among neutrino oscillation parameters, signals at lepton flavor experiments, and collider observables at high energies. We investigate reports that the type II seesaw can naturally accommodate recent measurements by the CDF collaboration, which finds the mass of the $W$ boson to be significantly larger than allowed by electroweak precision data, while simultaneously evading constraints from direct searches. Experimental scrutiny of this parameter space in the type II seesaw has long been evaded since it is not characterized by “golden channels” at colliders but instead by cascade decays, moderate mass splittings, and many soft final states. In this work, we test this parameter space against publicly released measurements made at the Large Hadron Collider. By employing a newly developed tool chain combining madgraph5_amc@nlo and contur, we find that most of the favored space for this discrepancy is already excluded by measurements of Standard Model final states. We give suggestions for further exploration at run III of the LHC, which is now under way.

The properties of the modified Maxwell electrodynamics (ModMax) are investigated in the presence of external and uniform electric and magnetic fields. We expand the nonlinear theory around an electromagnetic background up to second order in the propagating fields to obtain the permittivity and permeability tensors, dispersion relations, group velocity and refractive indices as functions of external fields. The case with perpendicular background fields is contemplated. The phenomenon of birefringence is discussed and the fundamental role of the ModMax parameter becomes clear. We calculate the difference of the refractive indices in terms of this parameter and the external fields. Finally, we set up a scenario where the axion is present and compute the interaction energy for the coupled axion-ModMax electrodynamics if a magnetic background field is considered. This calculation is carried out in the framework of the gauge-invariant, but path-dependent variables formalism. Our results show that the interaction energy contains a linear component, leading to the confinement of static probe charges where the interference between the ModMax parameter, the axion mass, and the axion-photon coupling constant is pointed out.

We explore the parameter space of lepton flavor violating (LFV) neutral Higgs Yukawa couplings with the muon and tau leptons that can be probed at the high-luminosity Large Hadron Collider (HL-LHC) via the vector boson fusion (VBF) Higgs production process. Our projected sensitivities for the Standard Model Higgs ($h$) LFV branching ratio $\text{Br}(h\to \mu \tau )$ in the $pp\to hjj\to (h\to \mu \tau )jj$ channel at the HL-LHC are contrasted with the current and future low-energy constraints from the anomalous magnetic moment and electric dipole moment of the muon, as well as with other LFV observables, such as $\tau \to 3\mu$ and $\tau \to \mu \gamma$. We also study the LFV prospects of a generic beyond the Standard Model neutral Higgs boson ($H$) with a mass in the range of $m_H\in [20,800]\mathrm{GeV}$ and give the projected model-independent upper limits on the VBF production cross section of $Hjj$ times the branching ratio of $H\to \mu \tau$ at the HL-LHC. We interpret these results in the context of a two-Higgs doublet model as a case study.

We investigate the di-Higgs production at the Large Hadron Collider in the two-Higgs doublet model (2HDM). In particular, we study the production of an extra neutral Higgs boson $\varphi$ in association with the Standard Model (SM) Higgs boson $h$ in the Higgs alignment limit. We analyze two scenarios where the additional Higgs $\varphi$ is in a $CP$-even or -odd state with a large top-Yukawa interaction. The leading contribution of this production comes from the top-quark loop-induced gluon-fusion channel $gg\to h\varphi$. The measurement of the $h\varphi$ production can probe the quartic couplings in the Higgs potential as well as the top-Yukawa couplings. Imposing both theoretical constraints (from the perturbative unitarity and the vacuum stability bounds) and experimental bounds (from the SM Higgs and flavor physics measurements) on the 2HDM parameter space, we calculate the production cross section of $gg\to h\varphi$. Furthermore, we scrutinize these processes in the parameter spaces where the CMS ditau and diphoton excesses around 100 GeV, and/or the muon $g-2$ anomaly can be accommodated.

In earlier work, we set up an effective potential approach at zero temperature for the Gribov-Zwanziger model that takes into account not only the restriction to the first Gribov region as a way to deal with the gauge fixing ambiguity, but also the effect of dynamical dimension-two vacuum condensates. Here, we investigate the model at finite temperature in presence of a background gauge field that allows access to the Polyakov loop expectation value and the Yang-Mills (de)confinement phase structure. This necessitates paying attention to Becchi-Rouet-Stora-Tyutin and background gauge invariance of the whole construct. We employ two such methods as proposed elsewhere in literature: one based on using an appropriate dressed, Becchi-Rouet-Stora-Tyutin invariant, gluon field by the authors and one based on a Wilson-loop dressed Gribov-Zwanziger auxiliary field sector by Kroff and Reinosa. The latter approach outperforms the former in estimating the critical temperature for $N=2$, 3 as well as correctly predicting the order of the transition for both cases.

We study anomalous $W^{-}{W}^{+}Z/\gamma$ couplings due to dimension-6 operators in the production process $e^{-}{e}^{+}\to W^{-}{W}^{+}$ followed by semileptonic decay using polarizations and spin-spin correlations of $W$ bosons. The construction of some of the polarization and spin-spin correlation asymmetries required one to distinguish between two decay quarks coming from $W^{+}$ decay. We developed an artificial neural network and a boosted decision tree to distinguish down-type jets from up-type jets and used them to put constraints on anomalous couplings at the International Linear Collider (ILC) running at $\sqrt{s}=250\mathrm{GeV}$ with integrated luminosities of $\mathcal{L}\in \{100{\mathrm{fb}}^{-1},250{\mathrm{fb}}^{-1},1000{\mathrm{fb}}^{-1},3000{\mathrm{fb}}^{-1}\}$. We find that the use of polarization and spin-correlation observables, on top of the cross sections, significantly improves the limits on anomalous coupling compared to the earlier studies.

Using initial-state radiation events from a total integrated luminosity of $11.957{\mathrm{fb}}^{-1}$ of $e^{+}{e}^{-}$ collision data collected at center-of-mass energies between 3.773 and 4.258 GeV with the BESIII detector at BEPCII, the cross section for the process $e^{+}{e}^{-}\to \mathrm{\Lambda }\overline{\mathrm{\Lambda }}$ is measured in 16 $\mathrm{\Lambda }\overline{\mathrm{\Lambda }}$ invariant mass intervals from the production threshold up to $3.00\mathrm{GeV}/c^2$. The results are consistent with previous results from BABAR and BESIII, but with better precision and with narrower $\mathrm{\Lambda }\overline{\mathrm{\Lambda }}$ invariant mass intervals than BABAR.

Quantum field theory can be a new medium for communication through quantum energy teleportation. We perform a demonstration of quantum energy teleportation with a relativistic fermionic field theory of self-coupled fermions, called the massive Thirring model. Our results reveal that there is a close relationship between the amount of energy teleported and the phase diagram of the theory. In particular, we show that the teleported energy peaks near the phase transition points. Since these results are obtained by measuring the two local subsystems, the noise from the quantum computation can be considerably reduced, allowing for efficient quantum simulations. Moreover, it is a new entanglement-based method that reveals global structure through local measurements.

Oscillons in a simple, one-dimensional scalar field theory with a cubic potential are discussed. The theory has a classical sphaleron, whose decay generates a version of the oscillon. A good approximation to the small-amplitude oscillon is constructed explicitly using the asymptotic expansion of Fodor et al., but for larger amplitudes a better approximation uses the discrete, unstable, and stable deformation modes of the sphaleron.

In interferometric gravitational wave detectors, quantum radiation pressure noise, which is a back action of the measurement, limits their sensitivity at low frequencies. Speed meters are one of the techniques to reduce the back-action noise and improve the sensitivity. Furthermore, a speed meter detector can surpass the standard quantum limit over a wide range of frequencies. The polarization circulation speed meter (PCSM) is the latest incarnation of the speed meter concept that requires only a modest modification to the conventional interferometer design. However, its control scheme has not been developed. The main difficulty is the length and alignment control of the cavity formed by the polarization circulation mirror and the input test masses, whose round-trip phase shift should be kept at $\pi$. In this article, we propose a new control scheme for the PCSM using a dual-retardation waveplate, called Dual-Retardance Control (DRC). We also compare the shot noise level of the DRC to another simpler scheme by using mirror dithering. Finally, we design the experimental setup to demonstrate the feasibility of the DRC and show the expected results through transfer function measurements.

We show that the Wald-Zoupas prescription for gravitational charges is valid in the presence of anomalies and field-dependent diffeomorphism, but only if these are related to one another in a specific way. The geometric interpretation of the allowed anomalies is exposed looking at the example of BMS symmetries; they correspond to soft terms in the charges. We determine if the Wald-Zoupas prescription coincides with an improved Noether charge. The necessary condition is a certain differential equation, and when it is satisfied, the boundary Lagrangian of the resulting improved Noether charge contains, in general, a nontrivial corner term that can be identified a priori from a condition of anomaly freeness. Our results explain why the Wald-Zoupas prescription works in spite of the anomalous behavior of BMS transformations, and should be helpful to relate different branches of the literature on surface charges.

Circumambient and galactic-scale environments are intermittently present around black holes, especially those residing in active galactic nuclei. As supermassive black holes impart energy on their host galaxy, so the galactic environment affects the geodesic dynamics of solar-mass objects around supermassive black holes and subsequently the gravitational waves emitted from such nonvacuum extreme-mass-ratio binaries. Only recently an exact general-relativistic solution has been found that describes a Schwarzschild black hole immersed in a dark matter halo profile of the Hernquist type. We perform an extensive analysis generic geodesics delving in such nonvacuum spacetimes and compare our results with those obtained in vacuum Schwarzschild spacetime, as well as calculate their dominant gravitational-wave emission. Our findings indicate that the radial and polar oscillation frequency ratios, which designate resonances, descend deeper into the extreme gravity regime as the compactness of the halo increases. This translates to a gravitational redshift of nonvacuum geodesics and their resulting waveforms with respect to the vacuum ones; a phenomenon that has also been observed for ringdown signals in these setups. We calculate the maximized overlap between waveforms resulting from orbital evolutions around Schwarzschild and nonvacuum geometries and find that it decreases as the halo compactness grows, meaning that dark matter environments should be distinguishable by space-borne gravitational-wave detectors. For compact environments, we find that the apsidal precession of orbits is strongly affected due to the gravitational pull of dark matter; the orbit’s axis can rotate in the opposite direction as that of the orbital motion, leading to a retrograde precession drift that depends on the halo’s mass, as opposed to the typical prograde precession transpiring in vacuum and galactic-scale environments. Gravitational waves in retrograde-to-prograde orbital alterations demonstrate transient frequency phenomena around a critical nonprecessing turning point, thus they may serve as a “smoking gun” for the presence of dense dark matter environments around supermassive black holes.

We present a framework for self-consistent cosmological analyses of the full-shape anisotropic bispectrum, including the quadrupole ($\ell =2$) and hexadecapole ($\ell =4$) moments. This features a novel window-free algorithm for extracting the latter quantities from data, derived using a maximum-likelihood prescription. Furthermore, we introduce a theoretical model for the bispectrum multipoles (which does not introduce new free parameters), and test both aspects of the pipeline on several high-fidelity mocks, including the PT Challenge suite of gigantic cumulative volume. This establishes that the systematic error is significantly below the statistical threshold, both for the measurement and modeling. As a realistic example, we extract the large-scale bispectrum multipoles from BOSS DR12 and analyze them in combination with the power spectrum data. Assuming a minimal $\mathrm{\Lambda }\mathrm{CDM}$ model, with a BBN prior on the baryon density and a Planck prior on $n_s$, we can extract the remaining cosmological parameters directly from the clustering data. The inclusion of the unwindowed higher-order ($\ell >0$) large-scale bispectrum multipoles is found to moderately improve one-dimensional cosmological parameter posteriors (at the 5%–10% level), though these multipoles are detected only in three out of four BOSS data segments at $\approx 5\sigma$. Combining information from the power spectrum and bispectrum multipoles, the real space power spectrum, and the postreconstructed BAO data, we find $H_0=68.2\pm 0.8\mathrm{km}{\mathrm{s}}^{-1}{\mathrm{Mpc}}^{-1}$, ${\mathrm{\Omega }}_m=0.33\pm 0.01$ and ${\sigma }_8=0.736\pm 0.033$ (the tightest yet found in perturbative full-shape analyses). Our estimate of the growth parameter $S_8=0.77\pm 0.04$ agrees with both weak lensing and CMB results. The estimators and data used in this work have been made publicly available.

Ultralight dark matter (ULDM) is an axion-like dark matter candidate with an extremely small particle mass. ULDM halos consist of a spherically symmetric solitonic core and an NFW-like skirt. We simulate halo creation via soliton mergers and use these results to explore the core-halo mass relation. We calculate the eigenstates of the merged halos and use these to isolate the solitonic core and calculate its relative contribution to the halo mass. We compare this approach to using a fitting function to isolate the core and find a difference in masses up to 8.2%. We analyze three families of simulations—equal-mass mergers, unequal mass mergers, and halos with a two-step merger history. Setting the halo mass to the initial mass in the simulation does not yield a consistent core-halo relationship. Excluding material “ejected” by the collision yields a core-halo relationship with a slope of $1/3$ for simultaneous mergers and roughly 0.4 for two-step mergers. Our findings suggest there is no universal core-halo mass relationship for ULDM and shed light on the differing results for the core-halo relationship previously reported in the literature.

We present the results of the search for the coalescence of compact binary mergers with very asymmetric mass configurations using convolutional neural networks and the Laser Interferometer Gravitational Wave Observatory/Virgo data for the third observation period (O3). Two-dimensional images in time and frequency are used as input. Masses in the range of $0.01-20M_{\odot }$ are considered. We explore neural networks trained with input information from a single interferometer, pairs of interferometers, or all three interferometers together, indicating that the use of the maximum information available leads to an improved performance. A scan over the O3 dataset using the convolutional neural networks for detection results in no significant excess from an only noise hypothesis. The results are translated into 90% confidence level upper limits on the merger rate as a function of the mass parameters of the binary system.

Event classifiers based either on the charged-particle multiplicity or the event shape have been extensively used in proton-proton ($pp$) collisions by the ALICE Collaboration at the LHC. The use of these tools became very instrumental since the observation of fluidlike behavior in high-multiplicity $pp$ collisions. In particular, the study as a function of the charged-particle multiplicity registered in the forward V0 ALICE detector allowed for the discovery of strangeness enhancement in high-multiplicity $pp$ collisions. However, one drawback of the multiplicity-based event classifiers is that requiring a high charged-particle multiplicity biases the sample towards hard processes like multijet final states. These biases make it difficult to perform jet-quenching searches in high-multiplicity $pp$ collisions. In this context, the present paper explores the use of the new event classifier, flattenicity; which uses the multiplicity calculated in the forward pseudorapidity region. To illustrate how this tool works, pp collisions at $\sqrt{s}=13.6\mathrm{TeV}$ simulated with pythia 8 are explored. The sensitivity of flattencity to multipartonic interactions as well as to the “hardness” of the collision are discussed. pythia 8 predictions for the transverse momentum spectra of light- and heavy-flavored hadrons as a function of flattenicity are presented.

Current data on semileptonic charged- and neutral-current $B$ decays show deviations from the predictions of the Standard Model. It is well known that a charged Higgs boson, belonging to the two-Higgs doublet model without $Z_2$ symmetry, offers one of the simplest solution to the charged-current $B$ decays. We show that this solution naturally induces a negative shift of $\mathcal{O}(1)$ in the Wilson coefficient ($C_{9\ell }$) of operator $({\overline{s}}_L{\gamma }_{\mu }{b}_L)(\overline{\ell }{\gamma }^{\mu }\ell )$, potentially resolving the tension in neutral-current $B$ decays as well. Interestingly, the lepton universality ratios in $b\to s{\ell }^{+}{\ell }^{-}$ decays, in tune with the recent LHCb result, remain SM-like. Precision constraints from neutral $B$ and $K$ meson mixing, decays $B_c\to \tau \overline{\nu }$, $B\to X_s\gamma$, and leptonic decays of $\tau$ and $Z$ can be satisfied. Furthermore, a positive shift in $W$-boson mass, nicely in agreement with the CDF measurement, is also possible, requiring the neutral scalars to be heavier than the charged Higgs but within the sub-TeV region.

Superconducting strings are topological defects appearing in cosmological early stage models, in tentative explanations of the high energy cosmic rays, galaxy formation and even in condensed matter to deal with some kind of superconductors. The main topic studied in this paper is the inverse photoelectric effect for superconducting lines namely, it is estimated the cross section corresponding to the adsorption of a fermion with the consequent emission of a photon. This issue is of importance, as some of these fermions can become a zero mode inside the core of the object, thus traveling at the speed of light and generating a possibly large current, whose cosmological implications has been discussed in a variety of works. A discussion is introduced comparing it to the Aharonov-Bohm cross section and relating them to the associated (Magnus) forces. It is also obtained a quite explicit description of the bound states and a version of Weyl’s law for the energies.