We extend our investigation on Couch-Torrence conformal inversions of black holes (BHs) and D-branes in various directions. We analyze asymptotically flat rotating charged BHs in $D=4$, in particular extremal rotating BHs in STU supergravity, and find invariance for special choices of the charges. Due to the dependence of the critical radii on the impact parameter(s), the relation between the scattering angle for geodesics outside the photon-halo and the inspiraling angle for geodesics inside the photon-halo is modified by the inclusion of a boundary term. We also consider rotating BHs in $D=5$ and rotating D3-branes and find invariance under generalized Couch-Torrence inversions for special choices of the angular momenta. Alas we don’t find any similar symmetry for smooth horizonless geometries. Moreover, relying on the surprising connection between classical BH perturbation theory and quantum Seiberg-Witten curves for $\mathcal{N}=2$ SYM theories, we study scalar wave equations in these backgrounds and identify the near superradiant modes produced in near-extremal BH mergers. Finally, we study scalar fluctuations around Kerr-Newman BHs in ${\mathrm{AdS}}_4$ and find stringent conditions for generalized Couch-Torrence symmetry that are relaxed in the extremal case or by allowing a rescaling of the wave function.

In tensor networks, a geometric operation of pushing a bond cut surface toward a minimal surface corresponds to entanglement distillation. Cutting bonds defines a reduced transition matrix on the bond cut surface and the associated quantum state naturally emerges from it. We justify this picture quantitatively by evaluating the trace distance between the maximally entangled states and the states on bond cut surfaces in the multiscale entanglement renormalization ansatz (MERA) and matrix product states in a canonical form. Our numerical result for the random MERA is in a reasonable agreement with our proposal. The result sheds new light on a deeper understanding of the Ryu-Takayanagi formula for entanglement entropy in holography and the emergence of geometry from the entanglement structure.

Motivated by recent studies of long-range forces between identical black holes, we extend these considerations by investigating the forces between two nonidentical black holes. We focus on classes of theories where charged black holes can have extremal limits that are not BPS. These theories, which live in arbitrary spacetime dimension, comprise gravity coupled to $N$ 2-form field strengths and ($N-1$) scalar fields. In the solutions we consider, each field strength carries an electric charge. The black hole solutions are governed by the $SL(N+1,R)$ Toda equations. In four dimensions, the black hole solutions in the $SL(3,R)$ example are equivalent to the “Kaluza-Klein dyons.” We find that any pair of such extremal black holes that are not identical (up to overall scaling) will repel one another. We also show that there can exist pairs of non-extremal, nonidentical black holes which obey a zero-force condition. Finally, we find indications of similar results in the higher examples, such as $SL(4,R)$.

In this paper, we show that there are circumstances in which the damping of gravitational waves (GWs) propagating through a viscous fluid can be highly significant; in particular, this applies to core collapse supernovae (CCSNe). In previous work, we used linearized perturbations on a fixed background within the Bondi-Sachs formalism to determine the effect of a dust shell on GW propagation. Here, we start with the (previously found) velocity field of the matter and use it to determine the shear tensor of the fluid flow. Then, for a viscous fluid, the energy dissipated is calculated, leading to an equation for GW damping. It is found that the damping effect agrees with previous results when the wavelength $\lambda$ is much smaller than the inner radius of the matter shell $r_i$; but, if $\lambda \gg r_i$, then the damping effect is greatly increased. Next, the paper discusses an astrophysical application, CCSNe. There are several different physical processes that generate GWs, and many models have been presented in the literature. The damping effect, thus, needs to be evaluated with each of the parameters $\lambda$ and $r_i$ and the coefficient of shear viscosity $\eta$ having a range of values. It is found that in most cases there will be significant damping and in some cases that it is almost complete. We also consider the effect of viscous damping on primordial gravitational waves generated during inflation in the early Universe. Two cases are investigated where the wavelength is either much shorter than the shell radii or much longer; we find that there are conditions that will produce significant damping, to the extent that the waves would not be detectable.

We compute the emission of linear momentum (kicks) by both gravitational and electromagnetic radiation in fully general-relativistic numerical evolutions of quasicircular charged black hole binaries. We derive analytical expressions for slowly moving bodies and explore numerically a variety of mass ratios and charge-to-mass ratios. We find that for the equal-mass case our analytical expression is in excellent agreement with the observed values, and, contrarily to what happens in the vacuum case, we find that in the presence of electromagnetic fields there is emission of momentum by gravitational waves. We also find that the strong gravitational kicks of binaries with unequal masses affect the electromagnetic kicks, causing them to strongly deviate from Keplerian predictions. For the values of charge-to-mass ratio considered in this work, we observe that magnitudes of the electromagnetic kicks are always smaller than the gravitational ones.

Purely geometrical arguments show that there exist classes of homospectral inflationary cosmologies, i.e., different expansion histories producing the same spectrum of comoving curvature perturbations. We develop a general algorithm to reconstruct the potential of minimally coupled single scalar fields from an arbitrary expansion history. We apply it to homospectral expansion histories to obtain the corresponding potentials, providing numerical and analytical examples. The infinite class of homospectral potentials depends on two free parameters, the initial energy scale and the initial value of the field, showing that, in general, it is impossible to reconstruct a unique potential from the curvature spectrum unless the initial energy scale and the field value are fixed, for instance, through observation of primordial gravitational waves.

The distribution of galaxies provides an ideal laboratory to test for deviations from General Relativity. In particular, redshift-space distortions are commonly used to constrain modifications to the Poisson equation, which governs the strength of dark matter clustering. Here, we show that these constraints rely on the validity of the weak equivalence principle, which has never been tested for the dark matter component. Relaxing this restrictive assumption leads to modifications in the growth of structure that are fully degenerate with modifications induced by the Poisson equation. This in turns strongly degrades the constraining power of redshift-space distortions. Such degeneracies can, however, be broken, and tight constraints on modified gravity can be recovered by measuring gravitational redshift from the galaxy distribution, an effect that will be detectable by the coming generation of large-scale structure surveys.

We study the three-particle and four-particle scattering amplitudes for an arbitrary, finite number of massive scalars, spinors and vectors by employing the on-shell massive spinor formalism. We consider the most general three-particle amplitudes with energy-growing behavior at most of $\mathcal{O}(E)$. This is the special case of the requirement of tree unitarity, which states that the $N$-particle scattering amplitudes at tree level should grow at most as $\mathcal{O}(E^{4-N})$ in the high-energy hard-scattering limit, i.e., at fixed nonzero angles. Then the factorizable parts of the four-particle amplitudes are calculated by gluing the on-shell three-particle amplitudes together and utilizing the fact that tree-level amplitudes have only simple poles. The contact parts of the four-particle amplitudes are further determined by tree unitarity, which also puts strong constraints on the possible allowed three-particle coupling constants and the masses. The derived relations among them converge to the predictions of gauge invariance in the UV theory. This provides a purely on-shell understanding of spontaneously broken gauge theories.

In an $SU(N_c)$ gauge theory with zero light quark flavors $N_f=0$, the only hadronic states that form below the confinement scale are composite gluon states called glueballs. These minimal confining sectors arise in many hidden valley extensions of the Standard Model, including scenarios that could hold the solution to the dark matter question and the hierarchy problem. Quantitative study of dark glueball phenomenology requires an understanding of pure glue hadronization, which to date is severely lacking. In this work we show that significant progress can be made by combining a perturbative pure glue parton shower with a self-consistent and physically motivated parametrization of the unknown nonperturbative physics, thanks to the modest hierarchy between the glueball mass and the confinement scale. We make our simulation code available as the public glueshower package, the first glueball generator for hidden valley theories, and perform preliminary studies of several glueball production observables, with theoretical uncertainties that take the full range of possible hadronization scenarios into account. We hope this will enable new studies of dark sector phenomenology that were previously inaccessible.

A new process with the lepton flavor violation (LFV) is presented in the setup for the LHC. The LFV is induced by the one-loop effect through Higgs bosons in the framework of the type-III two Higgs doublet model. At the decoupling limit of the parameter space of type-III two Higgs doublet model, where the masses of heavier Higgs bosons are at TeV scale while the mass of the lighter Higgs boson remains as the SM Higgs boson, the LFV process is strongly suppressed at the tree level. However, one-loop induced LFV process is instead realized to be a sizeable production cross section in vector-boson fusion production process at LHC. Since the LFV process may not be produced by the $s$-channel $H/A$ or $H^{\pm }$ bosons decays only, rather mixture with the $t$-channel production mode allows us to access to the higher Higgs boson mass region than current $s$-channel based searches at the LHC. This gives complementary path to cover the parameter spaces in LFV couplings.

The most recent $W$-boson mass measurement by the CDF Collaboration with a substantially reduced uncertainty indicates a significant deviation from the standard model prediction, as large as $7\sigma$ if taken literally. Then the Peskin-Takeuchi parameters of $S$ and $T$ shift to larger values, which has profound consequences in searching for physics beyond the SM. In the framework of two-Higgs-doublet models, we study the effect of the new $W$-boson mass measurement on the parameter space. Combined with other constraints including theoretical requirements, flavor-changing neutral currents in $B$ physics, the cutoff scale above 1 TeV, Higgs precision data, and direct collider search limits from the LEP, Tevatron, and LHC experiments, we find upper bounds on the masses of the heavy Higgs bosons; $M_{H,A,H^{\pm }}\lesssim 1.1\mathrm{TeV}$ in type I, II, X, and Y for the normal Higgs scenario; $M_{H^{\pm }}\lesssim 450\mathrm{GeV}$ and $M_A\lesssim 420\mathrm{GeV}$ in type I and X for the inverted scenario where the heavier $CP$-even Higgs bosons is the observed one. Another important finding is that type II and type Y in the inverted scenario are completely excluded. Such unprecedented findings imply that the upcoming LHC run can readily close out a large portion of the, still available, parameter space.

Quantum computers offer the possibility to implement lattice gauge theory in Minkowski rather than Euclidean spacetime, thus allowing calculations of processes that evolve in real time. In this work, calculations within SU(2) pure gauge theory are able to show the motion of an excitation traveling across a spatial lattice in real time. This is accomplished by using a simple yet powerful method for error mitigation, where the original circuit is used both forward and backward in time. For a two-plaquette lattice, meaningful results are obtained from a circuit containing hundreds of CNOT gates. The same method is used for a five-plaquette lattice, where calculations show that residual systematic effects can be reduced through follow-up mitigation.

When the allowed range of an observable grows order by order in perturbation theory, its perturbative expansion can have discontinuities (as in the $C$ parameter) or discontinuities in its derivatives (as in thrust or heavy jet mass) called Sudakov shoulders. We explore the origin of these logarithms using both perturbation theory and effective field theory. We show that for thrust and heavy jet mass, the logarithms arise from kinematic configurations with narrow jets and deduce the next-to-leading logarithmic series. The left-shoulder logarithms in heavy jet mass ($\rho$) of the form $r{\alpha }_s^n{\ln }^{2n}r$ with $r=\frac{1}{3}-\rho$ are particularly dangerous, because they invalidate fixed-order perturbation theory in regions traditionally used to extract ${\alpha }_s$. Although the factorization formula shows there are no nonglobal logarithms, we find Landau-pole-like singularities in the resummed distribution associated with the cusp anomalous dimension and that power corrections are exceptionally important.

Motivated by the newly observed resonance $X(2600)$ by BESIII Collaboration, we examine the trigluon glueball interpretation for it in the framework of QCD sum rules. We evaluate the mass spectra of the trigluon glueballs with quantum numbers $0^{-+}$ and $2^{-+}$ up to dimension 8 condensate in the operator product expansion. Our numerical results indicate that the mass of the $2^{-+}$ trigluon glueball is about $2.66\pm 0.06\mathrm{GeV}$, which is consistent with the mass of the X(2600) within the uncertainties, while $0^{-+}$ has a mass of $2.01\pm 0.14\mathrm{GeV}$. The possible decay channels of the $2^{-+}$ state are analyzed, which are crucial in decoding $X(2600)$’s internal structure and are hopefully measurable in BESIII, BEllEII, PANDA, and LHCb experiments.

We compute the four-loop corrections to the Higgs-bottom vertex within massless QCD and present analytic results for all color structures. The infrared poles of the renormalized form factor agree with the predicted four-loop pattern. Furthermore, we use the results for the Higgs-bottom, photon-quark, and Higgs-gluon form factors to provide hard matching coefficients in soft-collinear effective theory up to four-loop accuracy.

We present high-precision predictions for Z boson-pair production via electron-positron collisions by taking into account a full set of one-loop order scattering amplitudes, i.e., electroweak (EW) corrections together with soft and hard QED radiation. We provide a detailed numerical evaluation, from full EW corrections to pure QED corrections, specifically focusing on the effect of initial beam polarization on the production rate. The left-right asymmetry and angular distributions are also presented. The radiative corrections are largely affected by initial beam polarizations. We get an improvement of around three times with completely polarized beams of $e_L^{-}$ and $e_R^{+}$. We find that the radiative corrections can sizably modify the production rate, typically yielding a total relative correction up to a few tens of a percent. This implies that the full EW corrections are required for $e^{-}{e}^{+}\to ZZ$ to match with percent-level accuracy.

The semileptonic decay $D_s^{+}\to {\pi }^{+}{\ell }^{-}{\ell }^{+}$, where $\ell =e$, $\mu$, is used as a reference channel when looking for suppressed or forbidden processes of the standard model of the form $D_s\to P{\ell }^{\pm }{\ell }^{\prime +}$. The process is dominated by hadronic resonances from the $\eta$ to the $\varphi$ meson region, usually excluded due to the large uncertainties associated. In this work, we explore the role of the parameters involved in the resonance region. We focus in the relative strong phase between the $\rho$ and the $\varphi$ meson (${\delta }_{\rho \varphi }$). We argue that this parameter can be bound from LHCb data of the dimuon invariant mass in the $D_s^{+}\to {\pi }^{+}{\mu }^{-}{\mu }^{+}$ decay and we perform a fit to provide a first approach to it. We obtain ${\delta }_{\rho \varphi }=(0.44\pm 0.24)\pi$. In contradistinction, it would be useful to consider observables insensitive to this phase. We first compute the invariant mass of the lepton pair at a given angle of one of the leptons emission with respect to the pion, and then we compute the forward-backward distribution at such angle. We show that for the latter observable the resonance region is smeared, exhibiting no dependence on the ${\delta }_{\rho \varphi }$ phase, although global effects are observed by comparing with the pure phase space approach. In order to consider this observable in more general scenarios, we analyze the behavior for the resonant background process $D_s^{+}\to \pi \pi \pi$, the short distance contribution in the standard model, and the charged Higgs mediated process as given by the two Higgs doublet model, which exhibit distinguishable features among themselves.

String geometry theory is one of the candidates of the nonperturbative formulation of string theory. In this paper, from the closed bosonic sector of string geometry theory, we derive path integrals of perturbative strings on all of the string backgrounds, $G_{\mu \nu }(x)$, $B_{\mu \nu }(x)$, and $\mathrm{\Phi }(x)$, by considering fluctuations around the string background configurations, which are parametrized by the string backgrounds.

A maximally symmetric nonlinear extension of Maxwell’s theory in four dimensions called ModMax has been recently introduced in the literature. This theory preserves both electromagnetic duality and conformal invariance of the linear theory. In this short paper, we introduce a Galilean cousin of the ModMax theory, written in a covariant formalism, that is explicitly shown to be invariant under Galilean conformal symmetries. We discuss the construction of such a theory involving Galilean electromagnetic invariants and show how the classical structure of the theory is invariant under the action of Galilean conformal algebra.

A string is the one-dimensional generalization of a point particle. In this sense, the analog of a cloud of dust would be a cloud of strings. In this work, we consider a cloud of strings around a regular solution in general relativity. We consider the Bardeen solution and the Simpson-Visser solution, analyzing the consequences of the cloud in the regularity and in the energy conditions. Actually, the presence of the cloud could make the energy density positive when compared to the Simpson-Visser case. We verify that the usual Bardeen solution becomes singular in the presence of the cloud of string while the Simpson-Visser solution is still regular, violating the energy conditions, as the usual solution. We also calculate some thermodynamic quantities to evaluate how a cloud of strings influences the thermodynamics of the solutions.