Abstract: Medium spin states of light N = 50 isotones have been populated using fast neutron-induced fission of Th-232. Online prompt gamma spectroscopy has been performed using the hybrid gamma spectrometer nu-Ball coupled to the LICORNE directional neutron source at the ALTO facility of IJCLab. Medium spin states of the neutron-rich nucleus Ge-82 have been investigated using gamma-gamma and gamma-gamma-gamma coincidence data to exploit the resolving power of nu-Ball. Two new transitions were assigned to this nucleus and a new level was placed in the level scheme. We tentatively assigned to this new state a (7(+)) spin-parity, which is interpreted as a new N = 50 core breaking state. This provides further insight into the energy evolution of the N = 50 shell gap toward Ni-78.

Abstract: The optical appearance of a body compact enough to feature an unstable bound orbit, when surrounded by an accretion disk, is expected to be dominated by a luminous ring of radiation enclosing a central brightness depression typically known as the shadow. Despite observational limitations, the rough details of this picture have been now confirmed by the results of the Event Horizon Telescope (EHT) Collaboration on the imaging of the M87 and Milky Way supermassive central objects. However, the precise characterization of both features-ring and shadow-depends on the interaction between the background geometry and the accretion disk, thus being a fertile playground to test our theories on the nature of compact objects and the gravitational field itself in the strong-field regime. In this work we use both features in order to test a continuous family of solutions interpolating between regular black holes and horizonless compact objects, which arise within the Eddington-inspired Born-Infeld theory of gravity, a viable extension of Einstein's general relativity (GR). To this end we consider seven distinctive classes of such configurations (five black holes and two traversable wormholes) and study their optical appearances under illumination by a geometrically and optically thin accretion disk, emitting monochromatically with three analytic intensity profiles previously suggested in the literature. We build such images and consider the sub-ring structure created by light rays crossing the disk more than once and existing on top of the main ring of radiation. We discuss in detail the modifications as compared to their GR counterparts, the Lyapunov exponents of unstable nearly-bound orbits, as well as the differences between black hole and traversable wormholes for the three intensity profiles. In addition we use the claim by the EHT Collaboration on the radius of the bright ring acting (under proper calibrations) as a proxy for the radius of the shadow itself to explore the parameter space of our solutions compatible with such a result.

Abstract: Electroweak symmetry breaking explains the origin of the masses of elementary particles through their interactions with the Higgs field. Besides the measurements of the Higgs boson properties, the study of the scattering of massive vector bosons with spin 1 allows the nature of electroweak symmetry breaking to be probed. Among all processes related to vector-boson scattering, the electroweak production of two jets and a Z-boson pair is a rare and important one. Here we report the observation of this process from proton-proton collision data corresponding to an integrated luminosity of 139fb(-1) recorded at a centre-of-mass energy of 13TeV with the ATLAS detector at the Large Hadron Collider. We consider two different final states originating from the decays of the Z-boson pair: one containing four charged leptons and another containing two charged leptons and two neutrinos. The hypothesis of no electroweak production is rejected with a statistical significance of 5.7 sigma, and the measured cross-section for electroweak production is consistent with the Standard Model prediction. In addition, we report cross-sections for inclusive production of a Z-boson pair and two jets for the two final states.

Abstract: In this article, we consider the transverse momentum (qT) distribution of W and Z bosons produced in hadronic collisions. We combine the qT resummation for QED and QCD radiation including the QED soft emissions from the W boson in the final state. In particular, we perform the resummation of enhanced logarithmic contributions due to soft and collinear emissions at next-to-leading accuracy in QED, leading-order accuracy for mixed QED-QCD and next-to-next-to-leading accuracy in QCD. In the small-qT region we consistently include in our results the next-to-next-to-leading order (i.e. two loops) QCD corrections and the next-to-leading order (i.e. one loop) electroweak corrections. The matching with the fixed-order calculation at large qT has been performed at next-to-leading order in QCD (i.e. at O(alpha(2)(S))) and at leading order in QED. We show numerical results for W and Z production at the Tevatron and the LHC. Finally, we consider the effect of combined QCD and QED resummation for the ratio of W and Z qT distributions, and we study the impact of the QED corrections providing an estimate of the corresponding perturbative uncertainties.

Abstract: This paper aims to investigate the localization of the five-dimensional spinor field known as Elko (dual-helicity eigenspinors of the charge conjugation operator) by employing a Yukawa-like geometrical coupling in which the Elko field is non-minimally coupled to nonmetricity scalar Q. We adopt the braneworld scenarios in which the first-order formalism with sine-Gordon and linear superpotentials is employed to obtain the warp factors. A linear function supports the zero-mode trapping within the geometric coupling, leading to the same effective potential as the scalar field. Moreover, an exotic term must be added to obtain real-valued massive modes. Such modes are investigated through the Schrodinger-like approach.