Publications

Order by: publication date number of citations

• Tidal effects in gravitational waves from neutron stars in scalar-tensor theories of gravity

  Gastón Creci, Iris van Gemeren, Tanja Hinderer, Jan Steinhoff

  SciPost Phys. Core 8, 042 (2025) · published 22 May 2025 | Toggle abstract · pdf

  We compute tidal signatures in the gravitational waves (GWs) from neutron star binary inspirals in scalar-tensor gravity, where the dominant adiabatic even-parity tidal interactions involve three types of Love numbers that depend on the matter equation of state and parameters of the gravitational theory. We calculate the modes of the GW amplitudes and the phase evolution in the time and frequency domain, working up to first order in the post-Newtonian and small finite-size approximations. We also perform several case studies to quantify the dipolar and quadrupolar tidal effects and their parameter dependencies specialized to Gaussian couplings. We show that various tidal contributions enter with different signs and scalings with frequency, which generally leads to smaller net tidal GW imprints than for the same binary system in General Relativity.

  4 citations

• Gravitational higher-form symmetries and the origin of hidden symmetries in Kaluza-Klein compactifications

  Carmen Gómez-Fayrén, Tomás Ortín, Matteo Zatti

  SciPost Phys. Core 8, 010 (2025) · published 29 January 2025 | Toggle abstract · pdf

  We show that, in presence of isometries and non-trivial topology, the Einstein–Hilbert action is invariant under certain transformations of the metric which are not diffeomorphisms. These transformations are similar to the higher-form symmetries of field theories with $p$-form fields. In the context of toroidal Kaluza–Klein compactifications, we show that these symmetries give rise to some of the "hidden symmetries" (dualities) of the dimensionally-reduced theories.

  4 citations

• Matrix method and the suppression of Runge's phenomenon

  Shui-Fa Shen, Wei-Liang Qian, Jie Zhang, Yu Pan, Yu-Peng Yan, Cheng-Gang Shao

  SciPost Phys. Core 7, 034 (2024) · published 5 June 2024 | Toggle abstract · pdf

  Higher-degree polynomial interpolations carried out on uniformly distributed nodes are often plagued by overfitting, known as Runge's phenomenon. This work investigates Runge's phenomenon and its suppression in various versions of the matrix method for black hole quasinormal modes. It is shown that an appropriate choice of boundary conditions gives rise to desirable suppression of oscillations associated with the increasing Lebesgue constant. For the case of discontinuous effective potentials, where the application of the above boundary condition is not feasible, the recently proposed scheme with delimited expansion domain also leads to satisfactory results. The onset of Runge's phenomenon and its effective suppression are demonstrated by evaluating the relevant waveforms. Furthermore, we argue that both scenarios are either closely related to or practical imitations of the Chebyshev grid. The implications of the present study are also addressed.

  4 citations

• Dark matter from the centre of SU(N)

  Michele Frigerio, Nicolas Grimbaum-Yamamoto, Thomas Hambye

  SciPost Phys. 15, 177 (2023) · published 25 October 2023 | Toggle abstract · pdf

  A dark sector with non-abelian gauge symmetry provides a sound framework to justify stable dark matter (DM) candidates. We consider scalar fields charged under a $SU(N)$ gauge group, and show that the centre of $SU(N)$, the discrete subgroup $Z_N$ also known as $N$-ality, can ensure the stability of scalar DM particles. We analyse in some details two minimal DM models of this class, based on $SU(2)$ and $SU(3)$, respectively. These models have non-trivial patterns of spontaneous symmetry breaking, leading to distinctive phenomenological implications. For the $SU(2)$ model these include a specific interplay of two DM states, with the same interactions but different masses, and several complementary DM annihilation regimes, either within the dark sector or through the Higgs portal. The $SU(3)$ model predicts dark radiation made of a pair of dark photons with a unique gauge coupling, as well as regimes where DM semi-annihilations become dominant and testable.

  4 citations

• A contribution of the HAWC observatory to the TeV era in the high energy gamma-ray astrophysics: The case of the TeV-halos

  Ramiro Torres-Escobedo, Hao Zhou, Eduardo de la Fuente for the HAWC Collaboration

  SciPost Phys. Proc. 13, 029 (2023) · published 29 September 2023 | Toggle abstract · pdf

  We present a short overview of the TeV-Halos objects as a discovery and a relevant contribution of the High Altitude Water Çerenkov (HAWC) observatory to TeV astrophysics. We discuss history, discovery, knowledge, and the next step through a new and more detailed analysis than the original study in 2017. TeV-Halos will contribute to resolving the problem of the local positron excess observed on the Earth. To clarify the latter, understanding the diffusion process is mandatory.

  4 citations

• Chaos in the vicinity of a singularity in the three-body problem: The equilateral triangle experiment in the zero angular momentum limit

  Hugo D. Parischewsky, Alessandro A. Trani, Nathan W. C. Leigh

  SciPost Phys. Core 6, 016 (2023) · published 21 March 2023 | Toggle abstract · pdf

  We present numerical simulations of the gravitational three-body problem, in which three particles lie at rest close to the vertices of an equilateral triangle. In the unperturbed problem, the three particles fall towards the center of mass of the system to form a three-body collision, or singularity, where the particles overlap in space and time. By perturbing the initial positions of the particles, we are able to study chaos in the vicinity of the singularity. Here we cover both the singular region close to the unperturbed configuration and the binary-single scattering regime where one side of the triangle is very short compared to the other two. We make phase space plots to study the regular and ergodic subsets of our simulations and compare them with the outcomes expected from the statistical escape theory of the three-body problem. We further provide fits to the ergodic subset to characterize the properties of the left-over binaries. We identify the discrepancy between the statistical theory and the simulations in the regular subset of interactions, which only exhibits weak chaos. As we decrease the scale of the perturbations in the initial positions, the phase space becomes entirely dominated by regular interactions, according to our metric for chaos. Finally, we show the effect of general relativity corrections by simulating the same scenario with the inclusion of post-Newtonian corrections to the equations of motion.

  4 citations

• Directional dark matter searches

  Elisabetta Baracchini

  SciPost Phys. Proc. 12, 002 (2023) · published 3 July 2023 | Toggle abstract · pdf

  The importance of directly detect and experimentally probe the nature of Dark Matter (DM) is universally and incontrovertibly recognised as one of the most compelling tasks of today's fundamental physics. Directional DM searches aim at developing experimental techniques that can give access to the measurement of the incoming direction of the DM particle. This can provide a correlation with an astrophysical source that no background whatsoever can mimic and offers an unique key for a positive, unambiguous identification of a DM signal.

  3 citations

• QCD axion strings or seeds?

  Simone Blasi, Alberto Mariotti

  SciPost Phys. 18, 016 (2025) · published 15 January 2025 | Toggle abstract · pdf

  We study the impact of QCD axion strings on the cosmological history of electroweak (EW) symmetry breaking, focussing on the minimal KSVZ axion model. We consider the case of the pure SM Higgs potential as well as a simple scenario with a first order EW phase transition. We capture the effect of the Peccei-Quinn (PQ) sector within an effective-theory approach for the Higgs field, where the axion string core and the heavy PQ states are integrated out. The relevant parameters in this effective theory are controlled by the size of the portal coupling between the Higgs and the PQ scalar, and the mass of the PQ radial excitation. We determine the range of portal couplings for which the axion strings can strongly affect the dynamics of EW symmetry breaking. In the case of a first order EW phase transition, the strings can act as seeds by either catalyzing the nucleation of (non-spherical) bubbles, or leading to the completion of the phase transition by triggering a classical instability.

  3 citations

• EMRI_MC: A GPU-based code for Bayesian inference of EMRI waveforms

  Ippocratis D. Saltas, Roberto Oliveri

  SciPost Phys. Codebases 44 (2025) · published 16 January 2025 | Toggle abstract · pdf

  We describe a simple and efficient Python code to perform Bayesian forecasting for gravitational waves (GW) produced by Extreme-Mass-Ratio-Inspiral systems (EMRIs). The code runs on GPUs for an efficient parallelised computation of thousands of waveforms and sampling of the posterior through a Markov-Chain-Monte-Carlo (MCMC) algorithm. EMRI_MC generates EMRI waveforms based on the so-called kludge scheme, and propagates it to the observer accounting for cosmological effects in the observed waveform due to modified gravity/dark energy. The code provides a helpful resource for forecasts for interferometry missions in the milli-Hz scale, e.g the satellite-mission LISA.

  3 citations

• Gravitational wave induced baryon acoustic oscillations

  Christian Döring, Salvador Centelles Chuliá, Manfred Lindner, Bjoern Malte Schaefer, Matthias Bartelmann

  SciPost Phys. 12, 114 (2022) · published 31 March 2022 | Toggle abstract · pdf

  We study the impact of gravitational waves originating from a first order phase transition on structure formation. To do so, we perform a second order perturbation analysis in the $1+3$ covariant framework and derive a wave equation in which second order, adiabatic density perturbations of the photon-baryon fluid are sourced by the gravitational wave energy density during radiation domination and on sub-horizon scales. The scale on which such waves affect the energy density perturbation spectrum is found to be proportional to the horizon size at the time of the phase transition times its inverse duration. Consequently, structure of the size of galaxies and bigger can only be affected in this way by relatively late phase transitions at $\ge 10^{6}\,\text{s}$. Using cosmic variance as a bound we derive limits on the strength $\alpha$ and the relative duration $(\beta/H_*)^{-1}$ of phase transitions as functions of the time of their occurrence which results in a new exclusion region for the energy density in gravitational waves today. We find that the cosmic variance bound forbids only relative long lasting phase transitions, e.g. $\beta/H_*\lesssim 6.8$ for $t_*\approx 5\times10^{11}\,\text{s}$, which exhibit a substantial amount of supercooling $\alpha>20$ to affect the matter power spectrum.

  3 citations