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: 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: The unique dimension-5 effective operator, LLHH, known as the Weinberg operator, generates tiny Majorana masses for neutrinos after electroweak spontaneous symmetry breaking. If there are new scalar multiplets that take vacuum expectation values (VEVs), they should not be far from the electroweak scale. Consequently, they may generate new dimension-5 Weinberg-like operators which in turn also contribute to Majorana neutrino masses. In this study, we consider scenarios with one or two new scalars up to quintuplet SU(2) representations. We analyse the scalar potentials, studying whether the new VEVs can be induced and therefore are naturally suppressed, as well as the potential existence of pseudo-Nambu-Goldstone bosons. Additionally, we also obtain general limits on the new scalar multiplets from direct searches at colliders, loop corrections to electroweak precision tests and the W-boson mass.

Abstract: We address a general problem in the evaluation of triangle loops stemming from the consideration of the range of the interaction involved in some of the vertices, as well as the energy dependence of the width of some unstable particles in the loop. We find sizeable corrections from both effects. We apply that to a loop relevant to the D + s -> pi + pi 0 eta decay, and find reductions of about a factor of 4 in the mass distribution of invariant mass of the pi eta in the region of the a 0 ( 980 ) . The method used is based on the explicit analytical evaluation of the q 0 integration in the d 4 q loop integration, using Cauchy 's residues method, which at the same time offers an insight on the convergence of the integrals and the effect of form factors and cutoffs.

Abstract: We investigate gravitational -wave backgrounds (GWBs) of primordial origin that would manifest only at ultrahigh frequencies, from kilohertz to 100 gigahertz, and leave no signal at LIGO, the Einstein Telescope, the Cosmic Explorer, LISA, or pulsar -timing arrays. We focus on GWBs produced by cosmic strings and make predictions for the GW spectra scanning over high-energy scale (beyond 10 10 GeV) particle physics parameters. Signals from local string networks can easily be as large as the big bang nucleosynthesis/ cosmic microwave background bounds, with a characteristic strain as high as 10 – 26 in the 10 kHz band, offering prospects to probe grand unification physics in the 10 14 -10 17 GeV energy range. In comparison, GWB from axionic strings is suppressed (with maximal characteristic strain similar to 10 – 31 ) due to the early matter era induced by the associated heavy axions. We estimate the needed reach of hypothetical futuristic GW detectors to probe such GWB and, therefore, the corresponding high-energy physics processes. Beyond the information of the symmetry -breaking scale, the high -frequency spectrum encodes the microscopic structure of the strings through the position of the UV cutoffs associated with cusps and kinks, as well as potential information about friction forces on the string. The IR slope, on the other hand, reflects the physics responsible for the decay of the string network. We discuss possible strategies for reconstructing the scalar potential, particularly the scalar self -coupling, from the measurement of the UV cutoff of the GW spectrum.