Abstract: A novel experimental setup to measure deviations from the 1/r(2) distance dependence of Newtonian gravity was proposed in Donini and Marimon (Eur Phys J C 76:696, 2016). The underlying theoretical idea was to study the orbits of a microscopically-sized planetary system composed of a “Satellite”, with mass m(S) similar to O(10-9) g, and a “Planet”, with mass M-P similar to O(10-5) g at an initial distance of hundreds of microns. The detection of precession of the orbit in this system would be an unambiguous indication of a central potential with terms that scale with the distance differently from 1/r. This is a huge advantage with respect to the measurement of the absolute strength of the attraction between two bodies, as most electrically-induced background potentials do indeed scale as 1/r. Detection of orbit precession is unaffected by these effects, allowing for better sensitivities. In Baeza-Ballesteros et al. (Eur Phys J C 82:154, 2022), the impact of other subleading backgrounds that may induce orbit precession, such as, e.g., the electrical Casimir force or general relativity, was studied in detail. It was found that the proposed setup could test Yukawa-like corrections, alpha x exp(-r/lambda), to the 1/r potential with couplings as low as alpha similar to 10(-2) for distances as small as lambda similar to 10 μm, improving by roughly an order of magnitude present bounds. In this paper, we start to move from a theoretical study of the proposal to a more realistic implementation of the experimental setup. As a first step, we study the impact of air viscosity on the proposed setup and see how the setup should be modified in order to preserve the theoretical sensitivity achieved in Donini and Marimon (2016) and Baeza-Ballesteros et al. (2022).

Abstract: This work explores various manifestations of bumblebee gravity within the metric-affine formalism. We investigate the impact of the Lorentz violation parameter, denoted as X, on the modification of the Hawking temperature. Our calculations reveal that as X increases, the values of the Hawking temperature attenuate. To examine the behavior of massless scalar perturbations, specifically the quasinormal modes, we employ the Wentzel-Kramers-Brillouin method. The transmission and reflection coefficients are determined through our calculations. The outcomes indicate that a stronger Lorentz-violating parameter results in slower damping oscillations of gravitational waves. To comprehend the influence of the quasinormal spectrum on time-dependent scattering phenomena, we present a detailed analysis of scalar perturbations in the time-domain solution. Additionally, we conduct an investigation on shadows, revealing that larger values of X correspond to larger shadow radii. Furthermore, we constrain the magnitude of the shadow radii using the EHT horizon-scale image of SgrA* . Finally, we calculate both the time delay and the deflection angle.

Abstract: We propose a generalized Kim-Shifman-Vainshtein-Zakharov-type axion framework in which colored fermions and scalars act as two -loop Majorana neutrino -mass mediators. The global Peccei-Quinn symmetry under which exotic fermions are charged solves the strong CP problem. Within our general proposal, various setups can be distinguished by probing the axion-to-photon coupling at helioscopes and haloscopes. We also comment on axion dark -matter production in the early Universe.

Abstract: Leptoquarks are theorized particles of either scalar or vector nature that couple simultaneously to quarks and leptons. Motivated by recent measurements of coherent elastic neutrino -nucleus scattering, we consider the impact of scalar leptoquarks coupling to neutrinos on a few complementary processes, from low energy to colliders. In particular, we set competitive constraints on the typical mass and coupling of scalar leptoquarks by analyzing recent COHERENT data. We compare these constraints with bounds from atomic parity violation experiments, deep inelastic neutrino -nucleon scattering and collider data. Our results highlight a strong complementarity between different facilities and demonstrate the power of coherent elastic neutrino -nucleus scattering experiments to probe leptoquark masses in the sub-TeV range. Finally, we also present prospects for improving current bounds with future upgrades of the COHERENT detectors and the planned European Spallation Source.

Abstract: We develop a model aimed at understanding the three mass distributions of pairs of mesons in the Cabibbo-suppressed D-s(+) – K+pi(+)pi(-) decay recently measured with high statistics by the BESIII collaboration. The largest contributions to the process come from the D-s(+) -> K+ rho(0) and D-s(+) -> K*(0)pi(+) decay modes, but the D-s(+) -> K-0*(1430)pi(+) and D-s(+) -> K+ f(0) (1370) modes also play a moderate role and all of them are introduced empirically. Instead, the contribution of the f(0)(500), f(0)(980) , and K-0*(700) resonances is introduced dynamically by looking at the decay modes at the quark level, hadronizing q (q) over bar over bar pairs to give two mesons, and allowing these mesons to interact, for which we follow the chiral unitary approach, to finally produce the K+ pi(+) pi(-) final state. While the general features of the mass distributions are fairly obtained, we pay special attention to the specific effects created by the light scalar resonances, which are visible in the low mass region of the pi(+) pi(-) (f(0)(500) and K+ pi(-) K+pi-(K-0*(700)) mass distributions and a narrow peak for pi(+) pi(-) distribution corresponding to f(0)(980) excitation. The contribution of these three resonances is generated by only one parameter. We see the agreement found in these regions as further support for the nature of the light scalar states as dynamically generated from the interaction of pseudoscalar mesons.