Abstract: If present in the early universe, primordial black holes (PBHs) would have accreted matter and emitted high-energy photons, altering the statistical properties of the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB). This mechanism has been used to constrain the fraction of dark matter that is in the form of PBHs to be much smaller than unity for PBH masses well above one solar mass. Moreover, the presence of dense dark matter mini -halos around the PBHs has been used to set even more stringent constraints, as these would boost the accretion rates. In this work, we critically revisit CMB constraints on PBHs taking into account the role of the local ionization of the gas around them. We discuss how the local increase in temperature around PBHs can prevent the dark matter mini -halos from strongly enhancing the accretion process, in some cases significantly weakening previously derived CMB constraints. We explore in detail the key ingredients of the CMB bound and derive a conservative limit on the cosmological abundance of massive PBHs.

Abstract: Abundant phenomenology suggests that strong decays from relatively low-excitation hadrons into other hadrons proceed by the creation of a light quark-antiquark pair with zero total angular momentum, the so called 3P0 mechanism originating from a scalar bilinear. Yet the quantum chromodynamics (QCD) interaction is perturbatively mediated by gluons of spin one, and QCD presents a chirally symmetric Lagrangian. Such scalar decay term must be spontaneously generated upon breaking chiral symmetry. We attempt to reproduce this with the help of the quark-gluon vertex in Landau gauge, whose nonperturbative structure has been reasonably elucidated in the last years, and insertions of a uniform, constant chromoelectric field. This is akin to Schwinger pair production in quantum electrodynamics (QED), and we provide a comparison with its two field-insertions diagram. We find that, the symmetry being cylindrical, the adequate quantum numbers to discuss the production are rather 3E0, 3E1, and 3110 as in diatomic molecules, and we indeed find a sizeable contribution of the third decay mechanism, which may give a rationale for the 3P0 phenomenology, as long as the momentum of the produced pair is at or below the scale of the bare or dynamically generated fermion mass. On the other hand, ultrarelativistic fermions are rather ejected with 3E1 quantum numbers. In QED, our results suggest that 3E0 dominates, whereas the constraint of producing a color singlet in QCD leads to 3110 dominance at sub-GeV momenta.

Abstract: Upcoming experiments will improve the sensitivity to μ-> e processes by several orders of magnitude, and could observe lepton flavour-changing contact interactions for the first time. In this paper, we investigate what could be learned about New Physics from the measurements of these μ-> e observables, using a bottom-up effective field theory (EFT) approach and focusing on three popular models with new particles around the TeV scale (the type II seesaw, the inverse seesaw and a scalar leptoquark). We showed in a previous publication that μ-> e observables have the ability to rule out these models because none can fill the whole experimentally accessible parameter space. In this work we give more details on our EFT formalism and present more complete results. We discuss the impact of some observables complementary to μ-> e transitions (such as the neutrino mass scale and ordering, and LFV tau decays) and draw attention to the interesting appearance of Jarlskog-like invariants in our expressions for the low-energy Wilson coefficients.

Abstract: A search is performed for a heavy particle decaying into different-flavour, dilepton final states, using 139 fb(-1) of proton-proton collision data at root s = 13TeV collected in 2015-2018 by the ATLAS detector at the Large Hadron Collider. Final states with electrons, muons and hadronically decaying tau leptons are considered (e mu, e tau or μtau). No significant excess over the Standard Model predictions is observed. Upper limits on the production cross-section are set as a function of the mass of a Z' boson, a supersymmetric tau-sneutrino, and a quantum black-hole. The observed 95% CL lower mass limits obtained on a typical benchmark model Z' boson are 5.0TeV (e mu), 4.0TeV (e tau), and 3.9TeV (mu tau), respectively.

Abstract: The mass of the Higgs boson is measured in the H -> gamma gamma decay channel, exploiting the high resolution of the invariant mass of photon pairs reconstructed from the decays of Higgs bosons produced in proton-proton collisions at a centre-of-mass energy root s = 13 TeV. The dataset was collected between 2015 and 2018 by the ATLAS detector at the Large Hadron Collider, and corresponds to an integrated luminosity of 140 fb(-1). The measured value of the Higgs boson mass is 125.17 +/- 0.11 (stat.) +/- 0.09 (syst.) GeV and is based on an improved energy scale calibration for photons, whose impact on the measurement is about four times smaller than in the previous publication. A combination with the corresponding measurement using 7 and 8 TeV pp collision ATLAS data results in a Higgs boson mass measurement of 125.22 +/- 0.11 (stat.) +/- 0.09 (syst.) GeV. With an uncertainty of 1.1 per mille, this is currently the most precise measurement of the mass of the Higgs boson from a single decay channel.