The relic neutrinos from old supernova explosions are among the most ancient neutrino fluxes within experimental reach. Thus, the diffuse supernova neutrino background (DSNB) could teach us if neutrino masses were different in the past (redshifts $z\lesssim 5$). Oscillations inside the supernova depend strongly on the neutrino mass-squared differences and the values of the mixing angles, rendering the DSNB energy spectrum sensitive to variations of these parameters. Considering a purely phenomenological parametrization of the neutrino masses as a function of redshift, we compute the expected local DSNB spectrum here on Earth. Given the current knowledge of neutrino oscillation parameters, especially the fact that $|U_{e3}{|}^2$ is small, we find that the ${\nu }_e$ spectrum could be significantly different from standard expectations if neutrinos were effectively massless at $z\gtrsim 1$ as long as the neutrino mass ordering is normal. On the other hand, the ${\overline{\nu }}_e$ flux is not expected to be significantly impacted. Hence, a measurement of both the neutrino and antineutrino components of the DSNB should allow one to test the possibility of recent neutrino mass generation.

We present a new method which accounts for changes in the properties of gravitational-wave detector noise over time in the PyCBC search for gravitational waves from compact binary coalescences. We use information from LIGO data quality streams that monitor the status of each detector and its environment to model changes in the rate of noise in each detector. These data quality streams allow candidates identified in the data during periods of detector malfunctions to be more efficiently rejected as noise. This method allows data from machine learning predictions of the detector state to be included as part of the PyCBC search, increasing the total number of detectable gravitational-wave signals by up to 5%. When both machine learning classifications and manually generated flags are used to search data from LIGO-Virgo’s third observing run, the total number of detectable gravitational-wave signals is increased by up to 20% compared to not using any data quality streams. We also show how this method is flexible enough to include information from large numbers of additional arbitrary data streams that may be able to further increase the sensitivity of the search.

We study the stability of fluctuations around a homogeneous non-Abelian electric field background that is of a form that is protected from Schwinger pair production. Our analysis identifies the unstable modes and we find a limiting set of parameters for which there are no instabilities. We discuss potential implications of our analysis for confining strings in non-Abelian gauge theories.

Oscillons are long-lived, spatially localized field configurations, which are supported by attractive nonlinearities in the scalar potential. We study oscillons comprised of multiple interacting fields, each having an identical potential with quadratic, quartic and sextic terms. We consider quartic interaction terms of either attractive or repulsive nature. In the two-field case, we construct semianalytical oscillon profiles for different values of the potential parameters and coupling strength using the two-timing small-amplitude formalism. We use analytical and numerical techniques to explore the basin of attraction of stable oscillon solutions and show that, depending on the initial perturbation size, unstable oscillons can either completely disperse or relax to the closest stable configuration. We generalize our analysis to multifield oscillons and show that the governing equations for their shape and stability can be mapped to the ones arising in the two-field case. Finally, we study the emergence of multicomponent oscillons in one and three spatial dimensions, both numerically and through Floquet theory.

Infrared spectroscopy has been developed significantly. In particular, infrared photons can be measured with high spectral and angular resolution in state-of-the-art spectrographs. They are sensitive to monochromatic photons due to the decay and annihilation of particles beyond the standard model, such as dark matter (DM), while being insensitive to background photons that form a continuous spectrum. In this paper, we study the indirect detection of the DM decaying into infrared light using infrared spectrographs. In particular, we show that serious thermal and astrophysical noises can be overcome. As concrete examples, the Warm INfrared Echelle spectrograph to Realize Extreme Dispersion and sensitivity (WINERED) installed at the Magellan Clay 6.5 m telescope and Near-InfraRed Spectrograph (NIRSpec) at the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) are discussed. We show that a few hours of measurements of a faint dwarf spheroidal galaxy with WINERED (NIRSpec-like spectrograph) in the Magellan telescope (JWST) can probe an axionlike particle DM in the mass range $m_{\varphi }=1.8–2.7\mathrm{eV}$ (0.5–4 eV) with a photon coupling $g_{\varphi \gamma \gamma }\gtrsim {10}^{-11}{\mathrm{GeV}}^{-1}$. Complemental approaches, taking advantage of the high resolutions, such as the measurement of the Doppler shift of the signal photon lines and the possible search of the DM decay around the Milky Way Galaxy Center with infrared camera and spectrograph at 8.2 m Subaru telescope, are also presented.

In this work we investigate the infrared behavior of a Yang-Mills theory coupled to a massless fermion in the adjoint representation of the gauge group SU(2). This model has many interesting properties, corresponding to the $\mathcal{N}=2$ super-Yang-Mills theory without scalars and in the recent years there has been an increasing interest toward understanding whether confinement and fermion condensation occur at low energy. We simulate the theory on the lattice close to the massless limit using the overlap discretization of the fermion action, allowing a precise and clean study of the chiral symmetry-breaking pattern and of the fermion condensate. We present results for the scale setting, the condensate, and the running of the coupling constant through the gradient flow—all of them pointing to a theory without an infrared fixed point and remaining confined deep in the infrared regime.

In Monte Carlo calculations of expectation values in lattice quantum field theories, the stochastic variance of the sampling procedure that is used defines the precision of the calculation for a fixed number of samples. If the variance of an estimator of a particular quantity is formally infinite, or in practice very large compared to the square of the mean, then that quantity can not be reliably estimated using the given sampling procedure. There are multiple scenarios in which this occurs, including in Lattice Quantum Chromodynamics, and a particularly simple example is given by the Gross-Neveu model where Monte Carlo calculations involve the introduction of auxiliary bosonic variables through a Hubbard-Stratonovich (HS) transformation. Here, it is shown that the variances of HS estimators for classes of operators involving fermion fields are divergent in this model and an even simpler zero-dimensional analogue. To correctly estimate these observables, two alternative sampling methods are proposed and numerically investigated.

Quantum chromodynamics (QCD) predicts the existence of both nonperturbative intrinsic and perturbative extrinsic heavy quark contributions to the fundamental structure of hadrons. The existence of intrinsic charm at the 3-standard-deviation level in the proton has recently been established from structure function measurements by the NNPDF Collaboration. Here, we revisit the physics of intrinsic heavy quarks using light-front holographic QCD (LFHQCD)—a novel comprehensive approach to hadron structure which provides detailed predictions for dynamical properties of the hadrons, such as form factors, distribution amplitudes, structure functions, etc. We will extend this nonperturbative light-front QCD approach to study the heavy quark-antiquark contribution to the electromagnetic properties of nucleon. Our framework is based on a study of the eigenfunctions of the QCD light-front Hamiltonian, the frame-independent light-front wave functions (LFWFs) underlying hadron dynamics. We analyze the heavy quark content in the proton, induced either directly by the nonperturbative $|uud+Q\overline{Q}⟩$ Fock state or by the $|uud+g⟩$ Fock state, where the gluon splits into a heavy quark-antiquark pair. The specific form of these LFWFs are derived from LFHQCD. Using these LFWFs, we construct light-front representations for the heavy quark-antiquark asymmetry, the electromagnetic form factors of nucleons induced by heavy quarks, including their magnetic moments and radii.

In this work, we study the lensing effect of the QCD critical point on hydrodynamic trajectories and its consequences on the net-proton kurtosis ${\kappa }_4$. Including critical behavior by means of the BEST Collaboration equation of state (EoS), we first consider a scenario in equilibrium, then compare with hydrodynamic $0+1\mathrm{D}$ simulations with Bjorken expansion, including both shear and bulk viscous terms. We find that, both in and out of equilibrium, the size and shape of the critical region directly affect if the signal will survive through the dynamical evolution.

In this work, we study the radiative decay of a $Z$ boson to a $P$-wave quarkonium $H$ in association with a photon, where $H$ can be ${\chi }_{QJ}$, $h_Q$ with $Q=c$, $b$ and $J=0$, 1, 2. The helicity amplitudes and the unpolarized decay widths are evaluated up to QCD next-to-next-to-leading order (NNLO) within the framework of nonrelativistic QCD (NRQCD). For the first time, we check the NRQCD factorization for $h_Q$ exclusive production at two-loop order. The leading logarithms (LL) of $m_Z^2/m_Q^2$ in the leading-twist short-distance coefficients, which may potentially ruin the perturbative convergence, are resummed to all orders of ${\alpha }_s$ by employing the light-cone factorization. We find the radiative corrections are considerable for ${\chi }_{Q2}$ and $h_Q$ productions, while they are moderate or even minor for other channels. We also notice that the LL resummation can change the leading-order predictions for decay widths by more than 25% for ${\chi }_{c0,2}$ and $h_c$ productions, and by around 50% for ${\chi }_{c1}$ production. However, effects of the LL resummation on the next-to-leading-order and NNLO predictions are notably mitigated. Some phenomenological explorations are also performed.

Using a sample of $(448.1\pm 2.9)\times {10}^6\psi (3686)$ decays collected with the BESIII detector at BEPCII, we report an observation of ${\mathrm{\Xi }}^{-}$ transverse polarization with a significance of $7.3\sigma$ in the decay $\psi (3686)\to {\mathrm{\Xi }}^{-}{\overline{\mathrm{\Xi }}}^{+}$ (${\mathrm{\Xi }}^{-}\to \mathrm{\Lambda }{\pi }^{-}$, ${\overline{\mathrm{\Xi }}}^{+}\to \overline{\mathrm{\Lambda }}{\pi }^{+}$, $\mathrm{\Lambda }\to p{\pi }^{-}$, $\overline{\mathrm{\Lambda }}\to \overline{p}{\pi }^{+}$). The relative phase of the electric and magnetic form factors is determined to be $\mathrm{\Delta }\mathrm{\Phi }=(0.667\pm 0.111\pm 0.058)\mathrm{rad}$. This is the first measurement of the relative phase for a $\psi (3686)$ decay into a pair of ${\mathrm{\Xi }}^{-}{\overline{\mathrm{\Xi }}}^{+}$ hyperons. The ${\mathrm{\Xi }}^{-}$ decay parameters (${\alpha }_{{\mathrm{\Xi }}^{-}}$, ${\varphi }_{{\mathrm{\Xi }}^{-}}$) and their conjugates (${\alpha }_{{\overline{\mathrm{\Xi }}}^{+}}$, ${\varphi }_{{\overline{\mathrm{\Xi }}}^{+}}$), the angular-distribution parameter ${\alpha }_{\psi }$, and the strong-phase difference ${\delta }_p-{\delta }_s$ for $\mathrm{\Lambda }{\pi }^{-}$ scattering are measured to be consistent with previous BESIII results.

The gauge symmetry and shift/translational symmetry of a 3D BF action, which are associated to a pair of dual Lie algebras, can be combined to form the Drinfel’d double. This combined symmetry is the gauge symmetry of the Chern-Simons action, which is equivalent to the BF action, up to some boundary term. We show that something similar happens in four dimensions when considering a 2-BF action (also known as BFCG action), whose symmetries are specified in terms of a pair of dual strict Lie 2-algebras (i.e., crossed modules). Combining these symmetries gives rise to a 2-Drinfel’d double, which becomes the gauge symmetry structure of a four-dimensional BF theory, up to a boundary term. Concretely, we show how, using 2-gauge transformations based on dual crossed modules, the notion of 2-Drinfel’d double defined by Bai et al. [Commun. Math. Phys. 320, 149 (2013).] appears. We also discuss how, similarly to the Lie algebra case, the symmetric contribution of the $r$-matrix of the 2-Drinfel’d double can be interpreted as a quadratic 2-Casimir, which allows us to recover the notion of duality.

In this manuscript, we discuss a remarkable phenomenon concerning nonlinear and nonintegrable field theories in ($3+1$) dimensions, living at finite density and possessing nontrivial topological charges and non-Abelian internal symmetries (both local and global). With suitable types of Ansätze, one can construct infinite-dimensional families of analytic solutions with nonvanishing topological charges (representing the baryonic number) labeled by both two integer numbers and by free scalar fields in ($1+1$) dimensions. These exact configurations represent ($3+1$)-dimensional topological solitons hosting ($1+1$)-dimensional chiral modes localized at the energy density peaks. First, we analyze the Yang-Mills-Higgs model, in which the fields depend on all the space-time coordinates (to keep alive the topological Chern-Simons charge), but in such a way to reduce the equations system to the field equations of two-dimensional free massless chiral scalar fields. Then, we move to the nonlinear sigma model, showing that a suitable Ansatz reduces the field equations to the one of a two-dimensional free massless scalar field. Then, we discuss the Skyrme model concluding that the inclusion of the Skyrme term gives rise to a chiral two-dimensional free massless scalar field (instead of a free massless field in two dimensions as in the nonlinear sigma model) describing analytically spatially modulated hadronic layers and tubes. The comparison of the present approach both with the instanton-dyon liquid approach and with lattice QCD is shortly outlined.

The strong equivalence principle is violated by gravity theories of Milgromian dynamics [modified Newtonian dynamics (MOND)] through the action of the external field effect. We test two different Lagrangian theories Aquadratic-Lagrangian (AQUAL) and quasilinear MOND (QUMOND) based on their numerical solutions of the external field effect, by comparing two independent estimates of the mean external field strength of the nearby universe: a theory-deduced value from fitting the outer rotation curves of 114 galaxies and an empirical value from the large-scale distribution of cosmic baryons. The AQUAL-deduced external field strength from rotation curves agrees with that from the large-scale cosmic environment, while QUMOND-deduced value is somewhat higher. This suggests that AQUAL is likely to be preferred over QUMOND as an effective nonrelativistic limit of a potential relativistic modified gravity theory.

If dark matter interacts with the Standard Model (SM) via the $U(1{)}_D$ kinetic mixing portal at low energies, it necessitates not only the existence of portal matter particles which carry both dark and SM quantum numbers, but also a possible UV completion into which this $U(1{)}_D$ and the SM are both embedded. In earlier work, following a bottom-up approach, we attempted to construct a more unified framework of these SM and dark sector interactions. In this paper, we will instead begin to explore, from the top down, the possibility of the unification of these forces via the decomposition of a grand-unified-theory-like group, $G\to G_{\mathrm{SM}}\times G_{\mathrm{Dark}}$, where $U(1{)}_D$ is now a low-energy diagonal subgroup of $G_{\mathrm{Dark}}$ and where the familiar $G_{\mathrm{SM}}=SU(5)$ will play the role of a proxy for the conventional $SU(3{)}_c\times SU(2{)}_L\times U(1{)}_Y$ SM gauge group. In particular, for this study it will be assumed that $G=SU(N)$ with $N=6–10$. Although not our main goal, models that also unify the three SM generational structure within this same general framework will also be examined. The possibilities are found to be quite highly constrained by our chosen set of model-building requirements, which are likely too strong when they are employed simultaneously to obtain a successful model framework.

We present an updated calculation of the $W$ boson pole mass in models beyond the standard model with FlexibleSUSY. The calculation has a decoupling behavior and allows for a precise $W$-pole mass prediction up to large new physics scales. We apply the calculation to several standard model extensions, including the MRSSM where we show that it can be compatible with large corrections to the $W$ boson mass that would be needed to fit the recent 2022 CDF measurement.

If physics beyond the Standard Model (BSM) explains the $4.2\sigma$ difference between the Standard Model and measured muon anomalous magnetic moment $a_{\mu }$, minimal flavor violation predicts a shift in the analog quantity for the $\tau$ lepton $a_{\tau }$ at the ${10}^{-6}$ level, and even larger effects are possible in generic BSM scenarios such as leptoquarks. We show that this produces equivalent BSM deviations in the Pauli form factor $F_2(s)$ at $s=(10\mathrm{GeV}{)}^2$ and report the first complete two-loop prediction of $\mathrm{Re}{F}_2^{\mathrm{eff}}(100{\mathrm{GeV}}^2)=-268.77(50)\times {10}^{-6}$ for resonant $\tau$-pair production in $e^{+}{e}^{-}\to \mathrm{\Upsilon }(nS)\to {\tau }^{+}{\tau }^{-}$, $n=1$, 2, 3. $\mathrm{Re}{F}_2^{\mathrm{eff}}$ can be measured from $e^{-}$-helicity-dependent transverse and longitudinal asymmetries in $\tau$-pair events, which requires a longitudinally polarized $e^{-}$ beam. We discuss how Belle II asymmetry measurements could probe $a_{\tau }^{\mathrm{BSM}}$ at ${10}^{-6}$, assuming such a polarization upgrade of the SuperKEKB $e^{+}{e}^{-}$ collider, and conclude by outlining the next steps to be taken in theory and experiment along this new avenue for exploring realistic BSM effects in $a_{\tau }$.

Recently, the stochastic dynamical model based on the free energy landscape was proposed to quantify the kinetics of the black hole phase transition. An essential concept is the generalized free energy of the fluctuating black hole, which was defined in terms of the thermodynamic relation previously. In this work, by employing the Gibbons-Hawking path integral approach to black hole thermodynamics, we show that the generalized free energy can be derived from the Einstein-Hilbert action of the Euclidean gravitational instanton with the conical singularity. This work provides a concrete and solid foundation for the free energy landscape formalism of black hole phase transition.

As a contribution to the subject of the information loss paradox in ($1+1$)-dimensional gravitational systems, we study a model of ($1+1$)-dimensional dilaton gravity derived from the four-dimensional Einstein-Hilbert action by dimensional reduction. The reduced action involves the cosmological constant and admits black hole solutions. After including the backreaction of quantum fields to one-loop order, we solve the semiclassical field equations perturbatively and compute the quantum correction to the Hawking temperature. We consider the quantum extremal surface approach and invoke the “island rule” to compute the fine-grained entropy of the Hawking radiation for an eternal Schwarzschild black hole and demonstrate that it follows the unitary Page curve.