Abstract: The dynamical generation of wormholes within an extension of General Relativity (GR) containing (Planck's scale-suppressed) Ricci-squared terms is considered. The theory is formulated assuming the metric and connection to be independent (Palatini formalism) and is probed using a charged null fluid as a matter source. This has the following effect: starting from Minkowski space, when the flux is active the metric becomes a charged Vaidya-type one, and once the flux is switched off the metric settles down into a static configuration such that far from the Planck scale the geometry is virtually indistinguishable from that of the standard Reissner-Nordstrom solution of GR. However, the innermost region undergoes significant changes, as the GR singularity is generically replaced by a wormhole structure. Such a structure becomes completely regular for a certain charge-to-mass ratio. Moreover, the nontrivial topology of the wormhole allows us to define a charge in terms of lines of force trapped in the topology such that the density of lines flowing across the wormhole throat becomes a universal constant. In light of our results, we comment on the physical significance of curvature divergences in this theory and the topology change issue, which support the view that space-time could have a foamlike microstructure pervaded by wormholes generated by quantum gravitational effects.

Abstract: We present a solution for rotating black holes in massive gravity. We first give a solution of massive gravity with one dynamical metric. Both metrics of this solution are expressed in the advanced Eddington-Finkelstein-like coordinates: the physical metric has the original Kerr line element, while the fiducial metric is flat, but written in a rotating Eddington-Finkelstein form. For the bigravity theory we give an analogue of this solution: the two metrics have the original Kerr form, but, in general, different black hole masses. The generalization of the solution to include the electric charge is also given; it is an analogue of the Kerr-Newman solution in general relativity. We also discuss further possible ways to generalize the solutions.

Abstract: An improved measurement of the mass of the Higgs boson is derived from a combined fit to the reconstructed invariant mass spectra of the decay channels H -> gamma gamma and H -> ZZ* -> 4l. The analysis uses the pp collision data sample recorded by the ATLAS experiment at the CERN Large Hadron Collider at center-of-mass energies of 7 TeV and 8 TeV, corresponding to an integrated luminosity of 25 fb(-1). The measured value of the Higgs boson mass is m(H) = 125.36 +/- 0.37(stat) +/- 0.18 (syst) GeV. This result is based on improved energy-scale calibrations for photons, electrons, and muons as well as other analysis improvements, and supersedes the previous result from ATLAS. Upper limits on the total width of the Higgs boson are derived from fits to the invariant mass spectra of the H -> gamma gamma and H -> ZZ* -> 4l decay channels.

Abstract: We report the first measurement of the neutrino-oxygen neutral-current quasielastic (NCQE) cross section gamma It is obtained by observing nuclear deexcitation. rays which follow neutrino-oxygen interactions at the Super-Kamiokande water Cherenkov detector. We use T2K data corresponding to 3.01 x 10(20) protons on target. By selecting only events during the T2K beam window and with well-reconstructed vertices in the fiducial volume, the large background rate from natural radioactivity is dramatically reduced. We observe 43 events in the 4-30 MeV reconstructed energy window, compared with an expectation of 51.0, which includes an estimated 16.2 background events. The background is primarily nonquasielastic neutral-current interactions and has only 1.2 events from natural radioactivity. The flux-averaged NCQE cross section we measure is 1.55 x 10(-38) cm(2) with a 68% confidence interval of (1.22, 2.20) x 10(-38) cm(2) at a median neutrino energy of 630 MeV, compared with the theoretical prediction of 2.01 x 10(-38) cm(2).

Abstract: We evaluate the contribution to N_eff of the extra sterile states in low-scale type I seesaw models (with three extra sterile states). We explore the full parameter space and find that at least two of the heavy states always reach thermalization in the early Universe, while the third one might not thermalize provided the lightest neutrino mass is below O(10(-3) eV). Constraints from cosmology therefore severely restrict the spectra of heavy states in the range 1 eV-100 MeV. The implications for neutrinoless double beta decay are also discussed.