Abstract: We show that, after resolving what was thought to be an ambiguity in the Higgs coupling, the FSM gives, apart from two extra terms (i) and (ii) to be specified below, an effective action in the standard sector which has the same form as the SM action, the two differing only in the values of the mass and mixing parameters of quarks and leptons which the SM takes as Finputs from experiment while the FSM obtains as a result of a fit with a few parameters. Hence, to the accuracy that these two sets of parameters agree in value, and they do to a good extent as shown in earlier work,' the FSM should give the same result as the SM in all the circumstances where the latter has been successfully applied, except for the noted modifications due to (i) and (ii). If so, it would be a big step forward for the FSM. The correction terms are: (i) a mixing between the SM's gamma – Z with a new vector boson in the hidden sector, (ii) a mixing between the standard Higgs with a new scalar boson also in the hidden sector. And these have been shown a few years back to lead to (i') an enhancement of the W mass over the SM value,(2) – and (ii') effects consistent with the g – 2 and some other anomalies,(3) precisely the two deviations from the SM reported by experiments(4,5) recently much in the news.

Abstract: Objective. Background events are one of the most relevant contributions to image degradation in Compton camera imaging for hadron therapy treatment monitoring. A study of the background and its contribution to image degradation is important to define future strategies to reduce the background in the system. Approach. In this simulation study, the percentage of different kinds of events and their contribution to the reconstructed image in a two-layer Compton camera have been evaluated. To this end, GATE v8.2 simulations of a proton beam impinging on a PMMA phantom have been carried out, for different proton beam energies and at different beam intensities. Main results. For a simulated Compton camera made of Lanthanum (III) Bromide monolithic crystals, coincidences caused by neutrons arriving from the phantom are the most common type of background produced by secondary radiations in the Compton camera, causing between 13% and 33% of the detected coincidences, depending on the beam energy. Results also show that random coincidences are a significant cause of image degradation at high beam intensities, and their influence in the reconstructed images is studied for values of the time coincidence windows from 500 ps to 100 ns. Significance. Results indicate the timing capabilities required to retrieve the fall-off position with good precision. Still, the noise observed in the image when no randoms are considered make us consider further background rejection methods.

Abstract: In the context of the metric-affine Chern-Simons gravity endowed with projective invariance, we derive analytical solutions for torsion and nonmetricity in the homogeneous and isotropic cosmological case, described by a flat Friedmann-Robertson-Walker metric. We discuss in some details the general properties of the cosmological solutions in the presence of a perfect fluid, such as the dynamical stability and the emergence of big bounce points, and we examine the structure of some specific solutions reproducing de Sitter and power law behaviours for the scale factor. Then, we focus on first-order perturbations in the de Sitter scenario, and we study the propagation of gravitational waves in the adiabatic limit, looking at tensor and scalar polarizations. In particular, we find that metric tensor modes couple to torsion tensor components, leading to the appearance, as in the metric version of Chern-Simons gravity, of birefringence, characterized by different dispersion relations for the left and right circularized polarization states. As a result, the purely tensor part of torsion propagates like a wave, while nonmetricity decouples and behaves like a harmonic oscillator. Finally, we discuss scalar modes, outlining as they decay exponentially in time and do not propagate.