Abstract: Many gamma-ray bursts (GRBs) have been observed from radio wavelengths, and a few at very high energies (VHEs, >100 GeV). The High Altitude Water Cherenkov (HAWC) gamma-ray observatory is well suited to study transient phenomena at VHEs owing to its large field of view and duty cycle. These features allow for searches of VHE emission and can probe different model assumptions of duration and spectra. In this paper, we use data collected by HAWC between 2014 December and 2020 May to search for emission in the energy range from 80 to 800 GeV coming from a sample of 47 short GRBs that triggered the Fermi, Swift, and Konus satellites during this period. This analysis is optimized to search for delayed and extended VHE emission within the first 20 s of each burst. We find no evidence of VHE emission, either simultaneous or delayed, with respect to the prompt emission. Upper limits (90% confidence level) derived on the GRB fluence are used to constrain the synchrotron self-Compton forward-shock model. Constraints for the interstellar density as low as 10(-2) cm(-3) are obtained when assuming z = 0.3 for bursts with the highest keV fluences such as GRB 170206A and GRB 181222841. Such a low density makes observing VHE emission mainly from the fast-cooling regime challenging.

Abstract: We show that a significant quantum gain corresponding to squeezed or over-squeezed spin states can be obtained in multiparameter estimation by measuring the Hadamard coefficients of a 1D or 2D signal. The physical platform we consider consists of twolevel atoms in an optical lattice in a squeezed-Mott configuration, or more generally by correlated spins distributed in spatially separated modes. Our protocol requires the possibility to locally flip the spins, but relies on collective measurements. We give examples of applications to scalar or vector field mapping and compressed sensing.

Abstract: The T2K experiment widely uses plastic scintillator as a target for neutrino interactions and an active medium for the measurement of charged particles produced in neutrino interactions at its near detector complex. Over 10 years of operation the measured light yield recorded by the scintillator based subsystems has been observed to degrade by 0.9-2.2% per year. Extrapolation of the degradation rate through to 2040 indicates the recorded light yield should remain above the lower threshold used by the current reconstruction algorithms for all subsystems. This will allow the near detectors to continue contributing to important physics measurements during the T2K-II and Hyper-Kamiokande eras. Additionally, work to disentangle the degradation of the plastic scintillator and wavelength shifting fibres shows that the reduction in light yield can be attributed to the ageing of the plastic scintillator. The long component of the attenuation length of the wavelength shifting fibres was observed to degrade by 1.3-5.4% per year, while the short component of the attenuation length did not show any conclusive degradation.

Abstract: We revisit the gauge symmetry related to integrable projective transformations in metric-affine formalism, identifying the gauge field of the Weyl (conformal) symmetry as a dynamical component of the affine connection. In particular, we show how to include the local scaling symmetry as a gauge symmetry of a large class of geometric gravity theories, introducing a compensator dilaton field that naturally gives rise to a Stuckelberg sector where a spontaneous breaking mechanism of the conformal symmetry is at work to generate a mass scale for the gauge field. For Ricci-based gravities that include, among others, General Relativity, f(R) and f(R, R μnu R μnu) theories and the EiBI model, we prove that the on-shell gauge vector associated to the scaling symmetry can be identified with the torsion vector, thus recovering and generalizing conformal invariant theories in the Riemann-Cartan formalism, already present in the literature.

Abstract: The recently released Type Ia supernovae (SNe Ia) sample, Pantheon+, is an updated version of Pantheon and has very important cosmological implications. To explore the origin of the enhanced constraining power and internal correlations of datasets in different redshifts, we perform a comprehensively tomographic analysis of the Pantheon+ sample without and with the Cepheid host distance calibration, respectively. Specifically, we take two binning methods to analyze the Pantheon+ sample, i.e., equal redshift interval and equal supernovae number for each bin. For the case of equal redshift interval, after dividing the sample to 10 bins, the first bin in the redshift range z is an element of [0.00122, 0.227235] dominates the constraining power of the whole sample. For the case of equal supernovae number, the first three low redshift bins prefer a large matter fraction Omega(m) and only the sixth bin gives a relatively low cosmic expansion rate H-0. For both binning methods, we find no obvious evidence of evolution of H-0 and Omega(m) at the 2 sigma confidence level. The inclusion of the SHOES calibration can significantly compress the parameter space of background dynamics of the universe in each bin. When not considering the calibration, combining the Pantheon+ sample with cosmic microwave background, baryon acoustic oscillations, cosmic chronometers, galaxy clustering and weak lensing data, we give the strongest 1 sigma constraint H-0 = 67.88 +/- 0.42kms(-1) Mpc(-1). However, the addition of the calibration leads to a global shift of the parameter space from the combined constraint and H-0 = 68.66 +/- 0.42 km s(-1) Mpc(-1), which is inconsistent with the Planck-2018 result at about 2 sigma confidence level.