Publications

Order by: publication date number of citations

• SKATR: A self-supervised summary transformer for SKA

  Ayodele Ore, Caroline Heneka, Tilman Plehn

  SciPost Phys. 18, 155 (2025) · published 14 May 2025 | Toggle abstract · pdf

  The Square Kilometer Array will initiate a new era of radio astronomy by allowing 3D imaging of the Universe during Cosmic Dawn and Reionization. Modern machine learning is crucial to analyze the highly structured and complex signal. However, accurate training data is expensive to simulate, and supervised learning may not generalize. We introduce a self-supervised vision transformer, SKATR, whose learned encoding can be cheaply adapted for downstream tasks on 21cm maps. Focusing on regression and generative inference of astrophysical and cosmological parameters, we demonstrate that SKATR representations are maximally informative and that SKATR generalizes out-of-domain to differently-simulated, noised, and higher-resolution datasets.

  1 citation

• Visions in quantum gravity

  Luca Buoninfante, Benjamin Knorr, K. Sravan Kumar, Alessia Platania, Damiano Anselmi, Ivano Basile, N. Emil J. Bjerrum-Bohr, Robert Brandenberger, Mariana Carrillo González, Anne-Christine Davis, Bianca Dittrich, Paolo Di Vecchia, John F. Donoghue, Fay Dowker, Gia Dvali, Astrid Eichhorn, Steven B. Giddings, Alessandra Gnecchi, Giulia Gubitosi, Lavinia Heisenberg, Renata Kallosh, Alexey S. Koshelev, Stefano Liberati, Renate Loll, Leonardo Modesto, Paulo Moniz, Daniele Oriti, Olga Papadoulaki, Jan M. Pawlowski, Roberto Percacci, Lesław Rachwał, Mairi Sakellariadou, Alberto Salvio, Kellogg Stelle, Sumati Surya, Arkady Tseytlin, Neil Turok, Thomas Van Riet, Richard P. Woodard

  SciPost Phys. Comm. Rep. 11 (2025) · published 25 August 2025 | Toggle abstract · pdf

  To deepen our understanding of Quantum Gravity and its connections with black holes and cosmology, building a common language and exchanging ideas across different approaches is crucial. The Nordita Program "Quantum Gravity: from gravitational effective field theories to ultraviolet complete approaches" created a platform for extensive discussions, aimed at pinpointing both common grounds and sources of disagreements, with the hope of generating ideas and driving progress in the field. This contribution summarizes the twelve topical discussions held during the program and collects individual thoughts of speakers and panelists on the future of the field in light of these discussions.

  1 citation

• Resumming post-Minkowskian and post-Newtonian gravitational waveform expansions

  Andrea Cipriani, Giorgio Di Russo, Francesco Fucito, José Francisco Morales, Hasmik Poghosyan, Rubik Poghossian

  SciPost Phys. 19, 057 (2025) · published 26 August 2025 | Toggle abstract · pdf

  We derive formulae that resum, at a given order in the soft limit, the infinite series of Post-Minkowkian (small gravitational coupling) or Post-Newtonian (small velocities) corrections to the gravitational waveform produced by particles moving along a general (open or closed) trajectory in Schwarzschild geometry in the probe limit. Specifying to the case of circular orbits, we compute the wave form and the energy flux to order 30PN, and compare it against the available results in the literature. The results are based on a novel hypergeometric representation of the solutions of the Heun equation (and its confluence), that leads to a simple mathematical proof of the Heun connection formula.

  1 citation

• Prospects of future MeV telescopes in probingweak-scale dark matter

  Marco Cirelli, Arpan Kar

  SciPost Phys. 19, 080 (2025) · published 29 September 2025 | Toggle abstract · pdf

  Galactic weak-scale Dark Matter (DM) particles annihilating into lepton-rich channels not only produce gamma-rays via prompt radiation but also generate abundant energetic electrons and positrons, which subsequently emit through bremsstrahlung or inverse Compton scattering (collectively called "secondary-radiation photons"). While the prompt gamma-rays concentrate at high-energy, the secondary emission falls in the MeV range, which a number of upcoming experiments (AMEGO, E-ASTROGAM, MAST...) will probe. We investigate the sensitivity of these future telescopes for weak-scale DM, focusing for definiteness on observations of the galactic center. We find that they have the potential of probing a wide region of the DM parameter space which is currently unconstrained. Namely, in rather optimistic configurations, future MeV telescopes could probe thermally-produced DM with a mass up to the TeV range, or GeV DM with an annihilation cross section 2 to 3 orders of magnitude smaller than the current bounds, precisely thanks to the significant leverage provided by their sensitivity to secondary emissions. We comment on astrophysical and methodological uncertainties, and compare with the reach of high-energy gamma ray experiments.

  1 citation

• Uncertainty in mean $X_{\rm max}$ from diffractive dissociation estimated using measurements of accelerator experiments

  Ken Ohashi, Hiroaki Menjo, Takashi Sako, Yoshitaka Itow

  SciPost Phys. Proc. 13, 018 (2023) · published 28 September 2023 | Toggle abstract · pdf

  Mass composition is important for understanding the origin of ultra-high-energy cosmic rays. However, interpretation of mass composition from air shower experiments is challenging, owing to significant uncertainty in hadronic interaction models adopted in air shower simulation. A particular source of uncertainty is diffractive dissociation, as its measurements in accelerator experiments demonstrated significant systematic uncertainty. In this research, we estimate the uncertainty in $\langle X_{\rm max}\rangle$ from the uncertainty of the measurement of diffractive dissociation by the ALICE experiment. The maximum uncertainty size of the entire air shower was estimated to be $^{+4.0}_{-5.6} \mathrm{g/cm^2}$ for air showers induced by $10^{17}$ eV proton, which is not negligible in the uncertainty of $\langle X_{\rm max}\rangle$ predictions.

• Recent results from LHCb for astroparticle physics

  Hans Dembinski on behalf of the LHCb collaboration

  SciPost Phys. Proc. 13, 016 (2023) · published 28 September 2023 | Toggle abstract · pdf

  The LHCb experiment is a general-purpose forward spectrometer designed for the study of heavy flavour physics at the LHC. The acceptance in the pseudorapidity range $2 < \eta < 5$ with full tracking and particle identification capabilities down to very small transverse momentum make LHCb also ideal to study hadron production in the forward region. Measuring and modelling these processes is essential for the simulation of interactions of high-energy cosmic rays with matter, like Earth's atmosphere or the interstellar medium. We present recently published analyses from the LHCb collaboration relevant for this application.

• A measurement of the proton plus helium spectrum of cosmic rays in the TeV region with HAWC

  Juan Carlos Arteaga-Velázquez on behalf of the HAWC collaboration

  SciPost Phys. Proc. 13, 015 (2023) · published 28 September 2023 | Toggle abstract · pdf

  HAWC is an air-shower detector designed to study TeV gamma and cosmic rays. The observatory is composed of a 22000 $m^2$ array of 300 water Cherenkov tanks (4.5 m deep x 7.3 m diameter) with 4 photomultipliers (PMT) each. The instrument registers the number of hit PMTs, the timing information and the total charge at the PMTs during the event. From these data, shower observables such as the arrival direction, the core position at ground, the lateral age and the primary energy are estimated. In this work, we study the distribution of the shower age vs the primary energy of a sample of shower data collected by HAWC from June 2015 to June 2019 and employ a shower-age cut based on predictions of QGSJET-II-04 to separate a subsample of events dominated by H and He primaries. Using these data and a dedicated analysis, we reconstruct the cosmic ray spectrum of H+He from 6 to 158 TeV, which shows the presence of a softening at around 24 TeV with a statistical significance of 4.1$\sigma$.

• The composition of cosmic rays according to the data on EAS cores

  S. B. Shaulov, V. A. Ryabov, S. E. Pyatovsky, A. L. Shepetov, V. V. Zhukov

  SciPost Phys. Proc. 13, 014 (2023) · published 28 September 2023 | Toggle abstract · pdf

  The main purpose of this work is to find the causes of the break of the cosmic ray spectrum at an energy of 3 PeV, which is called the knee. The solution of the problem is associated with the determination of the nuclear composition of cosmic rays in the knee area. The conclusions of this work are based on the analysis of the characteristics of the EAS cores obtained using X-ray emulsion chambers. According to these data, a number of anomalous effects are observed in the knee region, such as scaling violation in the spectra of secondary hadrons, an excess of muons in EAS with gamma families and others. At the same energies equivalent to 1-100 PeV the laboratory system colliders show scaling behavior. So analysis of the data on the EAS cores suggests that the knee in their spectrum is formed by a component of cosmic rays of a non-nuclear nature, possibly consisting of stable (quasi-stable) particles of hypothetical strange quark matter, which named strangelets. This is the only model of the knee compatible with the magnetic rigidity of the nuclear spectra break R=100 TV. In fact, stranglets are stable heavy quasi-nuclei with a positive electric charge of Z=30-1000, so the mechanism of their acceleration coincides with the nuclear one. The break of the cosmic ray spectrum can be associated with a significantly larger mass of strangelets compared to nuclei.

• Limits to gauge coupling in the dark sector of super-heavy dark matter particles from the Pierre Auger Observatory data

  Olivier Deligny for the Pierre Auger Collaboration

  SciPost Phys. Proc. 13, 013 (2023) · published 28 September 2023 | Toggle abstract · pdf

  Assuming that the energy density of super-heavy particles matches that of dark matter observed today, tight constraints on the couplings governing the decay process are presented as a function of the particle mass. These constraints are obtained from the lack of signatures that would be suggestive of decaying super-heavy $X$ particles in the data of the Pierre Auger Observatory. In particular, instanton-induced decay processes allow us to derive a bound on the reduced coupling constant of gauge interactions in the dark sector: $\alpha_X \lesssim 0.09$, for $10^{9} \lesssim M_X/\mathrm{GeV} < 10^{19}$. Cosmological aspects for super-heavy dark matter production during the reheating epoch are discussed.

• Results on high energy galactic cosmic rays from the DAMPE space mission

  Leandro Silveri on behalf of the DAMPE Collaboration

  SciPost Phys. Proc. 13, 012 (2023) · published 28 September 2023 | Toggle abstract · pdf

  DAMPE (Dark Matter Particle Explorer) is a satellite-born experiment launched in 2015 in a sun-synchronous orbit at 500 km altitude, and it has been taking data in stable conditions ever since. Its main goals include the spectral measurements up to very high energies, cosmic electrons/positrons and gamma rays up to tens of TeV, and protons and nuclei up to hundreds of TeV. The detector's main features include the 32 radiation lengths deep calorimeter and large geometric acceptance, making DAMPE one of the most powerful space instruments in operation, covering with high statistics and small systematics the high energy frontier up to several hundreds TeV. The results of spectral measurements of different species are shown and discussed.