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Servant, G., & Simakachorn, P. (2024). Ultrahigh frequency primordial gravitational waves beyond the kHz: The case of cosmic strings. Phys. Rev. D, 109(10), 103538–24pp.
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.
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Forconi, M., Giare, W., Mena, O., Ruchika, Di Valentino, E., Melchiorri, A., et al. (2024). A double take on early and interacting dark energy from JWST. J. Cosmol. Astropart. Phys., 05(5), 097–37pp.
Abstract: The very first light captured by the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) revealed a population of galaxies at very high redshifts more massive than expected in the canonical Lambda CDM model of structure formation. Barring, among others, a systematic origin of the issue, in this paper, we test alternative cosmological perturbation histories. We argue that models with a larger matter component ohm m and/or a larger scalar spectral index n s can substantially improve the fit to JWST measurements. In this regard, phenomenological extensions related to the dark energy sector of the theory are appealing alternatives, with Early Dark Energy emerging as an excellent candidate to explain (at least in part) the unexpected JWST preference for larger stellar mass densities. Conversely, Interacting Dark Energy models, despite producing higher values of matter clustering parameters such as sigma 8 , are generally disfavored by JWST measurements. This is due to the energy -momentum flow from the dark matter to the dark energy sector, implying a smaller matter energy density. Upcoming observations may either strengthen the evidence or falsify some of these appealing phenomenological alternatives to the simplest Lambda CDM picture.
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Giarnetti, A., Herrero-Garcia, J., Marciano, S., Meloni, D., & Vatsyayan, D. (2024). Neutrino masses from new Weinberg-like operators: phenomenology of TeV scalar multiplets. J. High Energy Phys., 05(5), 055–37pp.
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.
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Bas i Beneito, A., Gargalionis, J., Herrero-Garcia, J., Santamaria, A., & Schmidt, M. A. (2024). An EFT approach to baryon number violation: lower limits on the new physics scale and correlations between nucleon decay modes. J. High Energy Phys., 07(7), 004–37pp.
Abstract: Baryon number is an accidental symmetry of the Standard Model at the Lagrangian level. Its violation is arguably one of the most compelling phenomena predicted by physics beyond the Standard Model. Furthermore, there is a large experimental effort to search for it including the Hyper-K, DUNE, JUNO, and THEIA experiments. Therefore, an agnostic, model-independent, analysis of baryon number violation using the power of Effective Field Theory is very timely. In particular, in this work we study the contribution of dimension six and seven effective operators to |triangle(B – L)| = 0, 2 nucleon decays taking into account the effects of Renormalisation Group Evolution. We obtain lower limits on the energy scale of each operator and study the correlations between different decay modes. We find that for some operators the effect of running is very significant.
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Baeza-Ballesteros, J., Donini, A., Molina-Terriza, G., Monrabal, F., & Simon, A. (2024). Towards a realistic setup for a dynamical measurement of deviations from Newton's 1/r2 law: the impact of air viscosity. Eur. Phys. J. C, 84(6), 596–20pp.
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).
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Gorkavenko, V., Jashal, B. K., Kholoimov, V., Kyselov, Y., Mendoza, D., Ovchynnikov, M., et al. (2024). LHCb potential to discover long-lived new physics particles with lifetimes above 100 ps. Eur. Phys. J. C, 84(6), 608–15pp.
Abstract: For years, it has been believed that the main LHC detectors can play only a limited role of a lifetime frontier experiment exploring the parameter space of long-lived particles (LLPs)-hypothetical particles with tiny couplings to the Standard Model. This paper demonstrates that the LHCb experiment may become a powerful lifetime frontier experiment if it uses the new Downstream algorithm reconstructing tracks that do not allow hits in the LHCb vertex tracker. In particular, for many LLP scenarios, LHCb may be as sensitive as the proposed experiments beyond the main LHC detectors for various LLP models, including heavy neutral leptons, dark scalars, dark photons, and axion-like particles.
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Alkofer, R., Llanes-Estrada, F. J., & Salas-Bernardez, A. (2024). Spinning pairs: Supporting 3P0 quark-pair creation from Landau-gauge Green's functions. Phys. Rev. D, 109(7), 074015–21pp.
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.
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Bhattacharya, S., Mondal, N., Roshan, R., & Vatsyayan, D. (2024). Leptogenesis, dark matter and gravitational waves from discrete symmetry breaking. J. Cosmol. Astropart. Phys., 06(6), 029–25pp.
Abstract: We analyse a model that connects the neutrino sector and the dark sector of the universe via a mediator 41., stabilised by a discrete Z4 symmetry that breaks to a remnant Z2 upon 41. acquiring a non -zero vacuum expectation value (v phi). The model accounts for the observed baryon asymmetry of the universe via additional contributions to the canonical Type -I leptogenesis. The Z4 symmetry breaking scale (v phi) in the model not only establishes a connection between the neutrino sector and the dark sector, but could also lead to gravitational wave signals that are within the reach of current and future experimental sensitivities.
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Coppola, M., Gomez Dumm, D., Noguera, S., & Scoccola, N. N. (2024). Masses of magnetized pseudoscalar and vector mesons in an extended NJL model: The role of axial vector mesons. Phys. Rev. D, 109(5), 054014–30pp.
Abstract: We study the mass spectrum of light pseudoscalar and vector mesons in the presence of an external uniform magnetic field B., considering the effects of the mixing with the axial-vector meson sector. The analysis is performed within a two-flavor NJL-like model which includes isoscalar and isovector couplings together with a flavor mixing 't Hooft-like term. The effect of the magnetic field on charged particles is taken into account by retaining the Schwinger phases carried by quark propagators, and expanding the corresponding meson fields in proper Ritus-like bases. The spin-isospin and spin-flavor decomposition of meson mass states is also analyzed. For neutral pion masses it is shown that the mixing with axial vector mesons improves previous theoretical results, leading to a monotonic decreasing behavior with B that is in good qualitative agreement with lattice QCD (LQCD) calculations, both for the case of constant or B-dependent couplings. Regarding charged pions, it is seen that the mixing softens the enhancement of their mass with B. As a consequence, the energy becomes lower than the one corresponding to a pointlike pion, improving the agreement with LQCD results. The agreement is also improved for the magnetic behavior of the lowest.thorn energy state, which does not vanish for the considered range of values of B-a fact that can be relevant in connection with the occurrence of meson condensation for strong magnetic fields.
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NA64 Collaboration(Andreev, Y. M. et al), Molina Bueno, L., & Tuzi, M. (2024). First Results in the Search for Dark Sectors at NA64 with the CERN SPS High Energy Muon Beam. Phys. Rev. Lett., 132(21), 211803–7pp.
Abstract: We report the first search for dark sectors performed at the NA64 experiment employing a high energy muon beam and a missing energy-momentum technique. Muons from the M2 beamline at the CERN Super Proton Synchrotron with a momentum of 160 GeV/c are directed to an active target. The signal signature consists of a single scattered muon with momentum < 80 GeV/c in the final state, accompanied by missing energy, i.e., no detectable activity in the downstream calorimeters. For a total dataset of (1.98 +/- 0.02) x 10(10) muons on target, no event is observed in the expected signal region. This allows us to set new limits on the remaining (m(Z)'; g(Z)') parameter space of a new Z' (L-mu – L-tau) vector boson which could explain the muon (g – 2)(mu) anomaly. Additionally, our study excludes part of the parameter space suggested by the thermal dark matter relic abundance. Our results pave the way to explore dark sectors and light dark matter with muon beams in a unique and complementary way to other experiments.
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