Abstract: Electromagnetic form factors serve to explore the intrinsic structure of nucleons and their strangeness partners. With electron scattering at low energies the electromagnetic moments and radii of nucleons can be deduced. The corresponding experiments for hyperons are limited because of the unstable nature of the hyperons. Only for one process this turns to an advantage: the decay of the neutral Sigma hyperon to a Lambda hyperon and a real or virtual photon. Due to limited phase space the effects caused by the Sigma-to-Lambda transition form factors compete with the QED radiative corrections for the decay sigma 0 -> e+e-. These QED corrections are addressed in the present work, evaluated beyond the soft-photon approximation, i.e., over the whole range of the Dalitz plot and with no restrictions on the energy of the radiative photon.

Abstract: A certain class of neutrino mass models predicts long-lived particles whose electric charge is four or three times larger than that of protons. Such particles, if they are light enough, may be produced at the LHC and detected. We investigate the possibility of observing those long-lived multi-charged particles with the MoEDAL detector, which is sensitive to long-lived particles with low velocities (beta) and a large electric charge (Z) with Theta equivalent to beta /Z less than or similar to 0.15. We demonstrate that multi-charged scalar particles with a large Z give three-fold advantage for MoEDAL; reduction of Theta due to strong interactions with the detector, and enhancement of the photon-fusion process, which not only increases the production cross-section but also lowers the average production velocity, reducing Theta further. To demonstrate the performance of MoEDAL on multi-charged long-lived particles, two concrete neutrino mass models are studied. In the first model, the new physics sector is non-coloured and contains long-lived particles with electric charges 2, 3 and 4. A model-independent study finds MoEDAL can expect more than 1 signal event at the HL-LHC (L=300fb-1) if these particles are lighter than 600, 1100 and 1430 GeV, respectively. These compare with the current ATLAS limits 650, 780 and 920 GeV for L=36fb-1. The second model has a coloured new physics sector, which possesses long-lived particles with electric charges 4/3, 7/3 and 10/3. The corresponding MoEDAL's mass reaches at the HL-LHC are 1400, 1650 and 1800 GeV, respectively, which compare with the current CMS limits 1450, 1480 and 1510 GeV for L=36fb-1. In a model-specific study we explore the parameter space of neutrino mass generation models and identify the regions that can be probed with MoEDAL at the end of Run-3 and the High-Luminosity LHC.

Abstract: We perform an ab initio calculation of the Nc scaling of the low-energy couplings of the chiral Lagrangian of low-energy strong interactions, extracted from the mass dependence of meson masses and decay constants. We compute these observables on the lattice with four degenerate fermions, Nf=4, and varying number of colours, Nc=3-6, at a lattice spacing of a similar or equal to 0.075 fm. We find good agreement with the expected Nc scaling and measure the coefficients of the leading and subleading terms in the large Nc expansion. From the subleading Nc corrections, we can also infer the Nf dependence, that we use to extract the value of the low-energy couplings for different values of Nf. We find agreement with previous determinations at Nc=3 and Nf=2,3 and also, our results support a strong paramagnetic suppression of the chiral condensate in moving from Nf=2 to Nf=3.