We infer the mean optical depth of a sample of optically selected galaxy clusters from the Dark Energy Survey via the pairwise kinematic Sunyaev-Zel’dovich (KSZ) effect. The pairwise KSZ signal between pairs of clusters drawn from the Dark Energy Survey Year-3 cluster catalog is detected at $4.1\sigma$ in cosmic microwave background temperature maps from two years of observations with the SPT-3G camera on the South Pole Telescope. After cuts, there are 24,580 clusters in the $\sim 1,400{\mathrm{deg}}^2$ of the southern sky observed by both experiments. We infer the mean optical depth of the cluster sample with two techniques. The optical depth inferred from the pairwise KSZ signal is ${\overline{\tau }}_e=(2.97\pm 0.73)\times {10}^{-3}$, while that inferred from the thermal SZ signal is ${\overline{\tau }}_e=(2.51\pm 0.55^{\mathrm{stat}}\pm 0.15^{\mathrm{syst}})\times {10}^{-3}$. The two measures agree at $0.6\sigma$. We perform a suite of systematic checks to test the robustness of the analysis.

The rate of dilepton emission from a magnetized hot hadronic medium is calculated in the framework of real time formalism of finite temperature field theory. We evaluate the one-loop self-energy of neutral rho mesons containing thermomagnetic propagators for the charged pions in the loop. The in-medium thermomagnetic spectral function of rho obtained by solving the Dyson-Schwinger equation is shown to be proportional to the dilepton production rate. The study of the analytic structure of the neutral rho-meson spectral function in such a medium shows that in addition to the usual contribution coming from the Unitary cut beyond the two-pion threshold there is a nontrivial yield in the low invariant-mass region originating due to the fact that the charged pions occupy different Landau levels before and after scattering with the neutral rho meson and is purely a finite magnetic-field effect.

Using a new sample of extremely metal poor systems, the EMPRESS survey has recently reported a primordial helium abundance that is $3\sigma$ smaller than the prediction from the standard big bang nucleosynthesis (BBN) scenario. This measurement could be interpreted as a hint for a primordial lepton asymmetry in the electron neutrino flavor. Motivated by the EMPRESS results, we present a comprehensive analysis of the lepton asymmetry using measurements of the abundances of primordial elements, along with cosmic microwave background (CMB) data from Planck. Assuming that there is no dark radiation in our Universe, we find an electron neutrino chemical potential ${\xi }_{{\nu }_e}=0.043\pm 0.015$, which deviates from zero by $2.9\sigma$. If no assumption is made on the abundance of dark radiation in the Universe, the chemical potential is ${\xi }_{{\nu }_e}=0.046\pm 0.021$, which deviates from zero by $2.2\sigma$. We also find that this result is rather insensitive to the choice of nuclear reaction rates. If the true helium abundance corresponds to the EMPRESS central value, future CMB observations from the Simons Observatory and CMB-S4 will increase the significance for a nonzero lepton asymmetry to $4\sigma$ and $5\sigma$ respectively, assuming no dark radiation, or to $3\sigma$ when no assumption is made on the abundance of dark radiation.

We propose a modification to the standard hybrid inflation model [A. D. Linde, Hybrid inflation, Phys. Rev. D 49, 748 (1994).], that connects a successful hybrid inflation scenario to the standard model Higgs sector, via the electroweak vacuum stability. The proposed model results in an effective inflation potential of a hilltop type, with both the trans-Planckian and sub-Planckian inflation regimes consistent with the recent Planck/BICEP combined results. Reheating via the inflation sector decays to right-handed neutrinos is considered. An upper bound on the reheating temperature $T_{\mathrm{R}}\lesssim 2\times {10}^{11}(1\times {10}^{13})\mathrm{GeV}$, for large (small) field inflation, will suppress contributions from one-loop quantum corrections to the inflation potential. This may push the neutrino Yukawa couplings to be $\mathcal{O}(1)$ and affect the vacuum stability. We show that the couplings of the SM Higgs field to the inflation sector can guarantee the electroweak vacuum stability up to the Planck scale. The so-called hybrid Higgs-inflaton model leads to a positive correction for the Higgs quartic coupling at a threshold scale, which is shown to have a very significant effect in stabilizing the electroweak vacuum. We find that even with $\mathcal{O}(1)$ neutrino Yukawa couplings, threshold corrections leave the SM vacuum stability intact.

If coupled feebly to the Standard Model bath, dark matter can evade the severe constraints from the direct search experiments. At the same time, such interactions help produce dark matter via the freeze-in mechanism. The freeze-in scenario becomes more interesting if one also includes the thermal masses of the different particles involved in the dark matter phenomenology. Incorporating such thermal corrections opens up the possibility of dark matter production via channels that remain kinematically disallowed in the standard freeze-in setup. Motivated by this, we investigate such freeze-in production of the dark matter in a minimally extended $U(1{)}_{L_{\mu }-L_{\tau }}$ framework, which is also known to resolve the muon $g-2$ anomaly. Here, the role of the dark matter is played by a scalar with a nontrivial charge under the additional symmetry $U(1{)}_{L_{\mu }-L_{\tau }}$. The importance of incorporating the appropriate finite temperature corrections to freeze-in dynamics is aptly demonstrated in this study using the $U(1{)}_{L_{\mu }-L_{\tau }}$ scenario as a prototype.

In this work, dual electroweak phase transition (EWPT) consisting of two phases is carefully studied in the two-Higgs-doublet model with the $S_3$ discrete symmetry. The role of $S_3$ here is to further separate the stages of the electroweak phase transition, compared to that of the original two-Higgs-doublet model (2HDM). The strength of the electroweak phase transition ($S$) in the model under consideration is large enough for the first-order EWPT, specifically $1<S<2.8$. The ratio between the two vacuum expectation values (VEVs), $\tan \beta =v_2/v_1$, is proven to have no effects on the strength of the phase transition. This ratio only affects the mass domain that causes the first-order phase transition. Furthermore, in this paper we will show clearly that when studying the EWPT in models of more than one scalar field that generates masses, one needs to analyze the problem of phase transition under multiple stages. In other words, the effect of the first stage of symmetry breaking to the second one is to simplify by suggestion that vacuum expectation value of the Higgs boson responsible for the initial stage is proportional to that of the field for the next stage.

The gauge bosons of the Pati-Salam model do not mediate proton decay at the renormalizable level, and for this reason it is possible to construct scenarios in which $\mathrm{SU}(4)\otimes \mathrm{SU}(2{)}_R$ is broken at relatively low scales. In this paper we show that such low-scale models generate dimension-five operators that can give rise to nucleon decays at unacceptably large rates, even if the operators are suppressed by the Planck scale. We find an interesting complementarity between the nucleon-decay limits and the usual meson-decay constraints. Furthermore, we argue that these operators are generically present when the model is embedded into SO(10), lowering the suppression scale. Under reasonable assumptions, the lower limit on the breaking scale can be constrained to be as high as $\mathcal{O}({10}^8)\mathrm{GeV}$.

We consider the inclusion of TeV-scale, fermionic dark matter in an asymptotically safe model of a gauged baryon number that has been recently proposed [Phys. Rev. D 106, 035015 (2022)] The new gauge boson serves as a portal between the dark and the visible sectors. The range of the baryon number gauge coupling and the kinetic mixing between baryon number and hypercharge are constrained by the requirement that nontrivial ultraviolet fixed points are reached. We show that this asymptotically safe dark matter model can achieve the correct dark matter relic density while remaining consistent with direct detection bounds.

We present a full phenomenological and analytical study for the neutrino mass matrix characterized by two vanishing $2\times 2$ subtraces. We update one past result in light of the recent experimental data. Out of the fifteen possible textures, we find seven cases can accommodate the experimental data instead of eight as in the past study. We also introduce few symmetry realizations for viable and nonviable textures based on non-Abelian ($A_4$ or $S_4$) flavor symmetry within the type-II seesaw scenario.

We revisit the minimal Nambu-Goldstone(NG)-Higgs supersymmetric (SUSY) SU(5) grand unified model and study its phenomenological implications. The Higgs sector of the model possesses a global SU(6) symmetry, which is spontaneously broken and results in the Higgs doublets of the minimal SUSY Standard Model (MSSM) as NG chiral superfields. Therefore, the model naturally leads to light Higgs doublets and solves the doublet-triplet splitting problem. Because of the SU(6) symmetry, the couplings of the Higgs sector are tightly restricted, and thus the model is more predictive than the minimal SUSY SU(5). We determine all the grand unified theory parameters via the matching conditions of the gauge coupling constants at the unification scale and calculate proton lifetime, confronting this with current experimental bounds. We discuss that this model is incompatible with the constrained MSSM, whilst it has a large viable parameter space in the high-scale SUSY scenario. The perturbativity condition on the trilinear coupling of the adjoint Higgs field imposes an upper (lower) limit on the wino (gluino) mass, implying a hierarchical mass pattern for these gauginos. Future proton-decay searches can probe a large part of the parameter space, especially if the SUSY-breaking scale is $\lesssim 100\mathrm{TeV}$.

Inspired by the recent observations of $T_{c\overline{s}0}^{0/++}$ in the processes $B^0\to {\overline{D}}^0{D}_s^{+}{\pi }^{-}$ and $B^{+}\to D^{-}{D}_s^{+}{\pi }^{+}$ by LHCb Collaboration, we investigate the decay properties of the $T_{c\overline{s}0}^0$ in a $D^{*}{K}^{*}$ molecule scenario, and the widths of $T_{c\overline{s}0}^0\to D^0{K}^0$, $D_s^{+}{\pi }^{-}$, $D_s^{*+}{\rho }^{-}$, $D_{s1}^{(\prime )+}{\pi }^{-}$, and $D^{*0}(D\pi {)}^0$ are estimated. Our estimations indicate that the width of $T_{c\overline{s}0}^0\to D_s^{+}{\pi }^{-}$ is sizable to be observed and the dominant decay mode of $T_{c\overline{s}0}^0$ is $D^0{K}^0$. Considering the isospin symmetry, we proposed to search $T_{c\overline{s}0}(2900{)}^{++}$ in the $D^{+}{K}^{+}$ invariant mass distributions of the process $B^{+}\to D^{+}{D}^{-}{K}^{+}$, where some preliminary experimental hints have been observed by LHCb Collaboration.

A nonrelativistic unparticle can be defined as an excitation created by an operator with a definite scaling dimension in a nonrelativistic field theory with an approximate conformal symmetry. The point-production rate of an unparticle has power-law dependence on its total energy with an exponent determined by its scaling dimension. We use the exact result for the 3-point function of primary operators in a nonrelativistic conformal field theory to derive the contribution to the point production rate of the unparticle from its decay into another unparticle recoiling against a particle. In the case where the conformal symmetry is broken by a large positive scattering length, we deduce the exponent of the energy in the point production rate of the loosely bound two-particle state recoiling against a particle with large relative momentum.

The worm-gear-T function parametrizes the probability of finding a longitudinally polarized quark inside a transversely polarized hadron. We extract it from data on polarized semi-inclusive deep-inelastic scattering measured at COMPASS and HERMES. As a theoretical model, we use a Wandzura-Wilczek-type approximation at next-to-leading order. We find that at present, the data quality is insufficient to determine the worm-gear-T function faithfully. We also provide predictions for the transverse single-spin asymmetry associated with the worm-gear-T function, which could be measured in weak-boson production at STAR.

The nonleptonic weak decay processes ${\mathrm{\Omega }}_c\to \mathrm{\Omega }{\pi }^{+}/\mathrm{\Omega }(1P){\pi }^{+}/\mathrm{\Omega }(1D){\pi }^{+}/\mathrm{\Omega }(2S){\pi }^{+}$ are studied using the constituent quark model. The branching fraction of ${\mathrm{\Omega }}_c\to \mathrm{\Omega }{\pi }^{+}$ is predicted to be 1.05%. Considering the newly observed $\mathrm{\Omega }(2012)$ resonance as a conventional $1P$-wave $\mathrm{\Omega }$ excited state with spin parity $J^P=3/2^{-}$, the newly measured ratio $\mathcal{B}[{\mathrm{\Omega }}_c\to \mathrm{\Omega }(2012){\pi }^{+}\to (\mathrm{\Xi }\overline{K}{)}^{-}{\pi }^{+}]/\mathcal{B}[{\mathrm{\Omega }}_c\to \mathrm{\Omega }{\pi }^{+}]$ at Belle can be well understood. Besides, the production rates for the missing $1P$-wave state $\mathrm{\Omega }(1^2{P}_{1/2^{-}})$, two spin quartet $1D$-wave states $\mathrm{\Omega }(1^4{D}_{1/2^{+}})$ and $\mathrm{\Omega }(1^4{D}_{3/2^{+}})$, and two $2S$-wave states $\mathrm{\Omega }(2^2{S}_{1/2^{+}})$ and $\mathrm{\Omega }(2^4{S}_{3/2^{+}})$ are also investigated. It is expected that these missing excited $\mathrm{\Omega }$ baryons should have large potentials to be discovered through the nonleptonic weak decays of ${\mathrm{\Omega }}_c$ in forthcoming experiments by Belle II and/or LHCb.

Boosted dark particles of astrophysical origin can lead to nonstandard nuclear or electron recoil signals in direct detection experiments. We conduct an investigation of the daily modulation feature of a potential future signal of this type. In particular, we perform simulations of the dark particle interactions with electrons in atoms building up the Earth on its path to the detector and provide in-depth predictions for the expected daily changes in the signal for various direct detection experiments, including XENONnT, PandaX, and LUX-ZEPLIN.

Using the entire data sample of $980{\mathrm{fb}}^{-1}$ collected at or near the $\mathrm{\Upsilon }(4S)$ resonance with the Belle detector operating at the KEKB asymmetric-energy $e^{+}{e}^{-}$ collider, we report the measurement of the mass, width, and the branching ratios of the ${\mathrm{\Lambda }}_c(2625{)}^{+}$ charmed baryon. The mass difference between ${\mathrm{\Lambda }}_c(2625{)}^{+}$ and ${\mathrm{\Lambda }}_c^{+}$ is measured to be $M({\mathrm{\Lambda }}_c(2625{)}^{+})-M({\mathrm{\Lambda }}_c^{+})=341.518\pm 0.006\pm 0.049\mathrm{MeV}/c^2$. The upper limit on the width is measured to be $\mathrm{\Gamma }({\mathrm{\Lambda }}_c(2625{)}^{+})<0.52\mathrm{MeV}/c^2$ at 90% confidence level. Based on a full Dalitz plot fit, branching ratios with respect to the mode ${\mathrm{\Lambda }}_c(2625{)}^{+}\to {\mathrm{\Lambda }}_c^{+}{\pi }^{+}{\pi }^{-}$ are measured to be $\frac{\mathcal{B}({\mathrm{\Lambda }}_c(2625{)}^{+}\to {\mathrm{\Sigma }}_c^0{\pi }^{+})}{\mathcal{B}({\mathrm{\Lambda }}_c(2625{)}^{+}\to {\mathrm{\Lambda }}_c^{+}{\pi }^{+}{\pi }^{-})}=(5.19\pm 0.23\pm 0.40)\%$ and $\frac{\mathcal{B}({\mathrm{\Lambda }}_c(2625{)}^{+}\to {\mathrm{\Sigma }}_c^{++}{\pi }^{-})}{\mathcal{B}({\mathrm{\Lambda }}_c(2625{)}^{+}\to {\mathrm{\Lambda }}_c^{+}{\pi }^{+}{\pi }^{-})}=(5.13\pm 0.26\pm 0.32)\%$, where the first and second uncertainties are statistical and systematic, respectively. These measurements can be used to further constrain the parameters of the underlying theoretical models.

We report a measurement of the cross section for the process $e^{+}{e}^{-}\to {\pi }^{+}{\pi }^{-}J/\psi$ around the $X(3872)$ mass in search for the direct formation of $e^{+}{e}^{-}\to X(3872)$ through the two-photon fusion process. No enhancement of the cross section is observed at the $X(3872)$ peak and an upper limit on the product of electronic width and branching fraction of $X(3872)\to {\pi }^{+}{\pi }^{-}J/\psi$ is determined to be ${\mathrm{\Gamma }}_{ee}\times \mathcal{B}(X(3872)\to {\pi }^{+}{\pi }^{-}J/\psi )<7.5\times {10}^{-3}\mathrm{eV}$ at 90% confidence level under an assumption of total width of $1.19\pm 0.21\mathrm{MeV}$. This is an improvement of a factor of about 17 compared to the previous limit. Furthermore, using the latest result of $\mathcal{B}(X(3872)\to {\pi }^{+}{\pi }^{-}J/\psi )$, an upper limit on the electronic width ${\mathrm{\Gamma }}_{ee}$ of $X(3872)$ is obtained to be $<0.32\mathrm{eV}$ at the 90% confidence level.