Publications

Order by: publication date number of citations

• Immigration Detention at Sea: maritime migration governance in Australia and the sanctioning of indefinite detention for the purpose of removal

  Andonea Jon Dickson

  Mig. Pol. 3, 002 (2024) · published 19 June 2024 | Toggle abstract · pdf

  Over the past four decades, maritime geographies have become prominent sites of migration governance. While there is important scholarly work on these spaces, charting changing techniques of control and containment, what continues to demand attention is the governance that works through systematically keeping people seeking asylum mobile at sea. This article focuses on Australia, examining the coerced mobilities that follow interdictions at sea and their carceral nature. I interrogate the High Court case, CPCF v Minister for Immigration and Border Protection, which addresses the extended maritime detention of 157 people seeking asylum in June 2014. Through analysing the language used in this case, such as the conclusion by the majority that “to detain” a person at sea mandates a concomitant duty “to take” that person somewhere, I highlight how coerced mobility has become central to Australia’s strategy of maritime migration governance and how this has come to legitimate detention at sea without any clear time limitation. This will reveal the extent to which carcerality informs migration governance in Australia’s maritime geographies.

• Relativistic kinematics in flat and curved space-times

  Patrick Moylan

  SciPost Phys. Proc. 14, 037 (2023) · published 24 November 2023 | Toggle abstract · pdf

  Almost immediately after the seminal papers of Poincaré (1905,1906) and Einstein (1905) on special relativity, wherein Poincaré established the full covariance of the Maxwell-Lorentz equations under the scale-extended Poincaré group and Einstein explained the Lorentz transformation using his assumption that the one-way speed of light in vacuo is constant and the same for all inertial observers (Einstein's second postulate), attempts were made to get at the Lorentz transformations from basic properties of space and time but avoiding Einstein's second postulate. Various such approaches usually involve general consequences of the relativity principle, such as a group structure to the set of all admissible inertial transformations and also assumptions about causality and/or homogeneity of space-time combined with isotropy of space. The first such attempt is usually attributed to von Ignatowsky in 1911. It was followed shortly thereafter by a paper of Frank and Rothe published in the same year. Since then, papers have continued to be written on the subject even up to the present. We elaborate on some of the results of such papers paying special attention to a 1968 paper of Bacri and Lévy-Leblond where possible kinematical groups include the de Sitter and anti-de Sitter groups and lead to special relativity in de Sitter and anti-de Sitter spaces.

• Vinberg's T-algebras: From exceptional periodicity to black hole entropy

  Alessio Marrani

  SciPost Phys. Proc. 14, 035 (2023) · published 24 November 2023 | Toggle abstract · pdf

  We introduce the so-called Magic Star (MS) projection within the root lattice of finite-dimensional exceptional Lie algebras, and relate it to rank-3 simple and semi-simple Jordan algebras. By relying on the Bott periodicity of reality and conjugacy properties of spinor representations, we present the so-called Exceptional Periodicity (EP) algebras, which are finite-dimensional algebras, violating the Jacobi identity, and providing an alternative with respect to Kac-Moody infinite-dimensional Lie algebras. Remarkably, also EP algebras can be characterized in terms of a MS projection, exploiting special Vinberg T-algebras, a class of generalized Hermitian matrix algebras introduced by Vinberg in the '60s within his theory of homogeneous convex cones. As physical applications, we highlight the role of the invariant norm of special Vinberg T-algebras in Maxwell-Einstein-scalar theories in 5 space-time dimensions, in which the Bekenstein-Hawking entropy of extremal black strings can be expressed in terms of the cubic polynomial norm of the T-algebras.

• MEG final results and progress towards MEG II

  Toshiyuki Iwamoto on behalf of the MEG II collaboration

  SciPost Phys. Proc. 1, 040 (2019) · published 21 February 2019 | Toggle abstract · pdf

  The MEG experiment, which is to search for lepton flavor violating muon decay, had been successfully finished in 2013. The final sensitivity of the experiment was 5.3 × 10−13, and since the experiment did not find any signal, the upper limit of the branching ratio of the μ+ → e+γ was set to be 4.2 × 10−13 at 90% CL. The MEG II experiment will improve the sensitivity by an order of magnitude with three years data taking, and the target sensitivity is 6×10−14. In 2018 after the detector integration, the muon beam data taking will be planned with limited number of readout channels. In 2019, the engineering run and the physics run will be started.

• Hands-on introduction to randomized benchmarking

  Ana Silva, Eliska Greplova

  SciPost Phys. Lect. Notes 97 (2025) · published 21 July 2025 | Toggle abstract · pdf

  Randomized benchmarking techniques have been an essential tool for assessing the performance of contemporary quantum devices. The goal of this tutorial is to provide a pedagogical, self-contained, introduction to randomized benchmarking. With this intention, every chapter is also supplemented with an accompanying Python notebook, illustrating the essential steps of each protocol. In addition, we also introduce more recent trends in the field that bridge shadow tomography with randomized benchmarking, namely through the gate-set shadow protocol.

• Intermittency analysis of charged hadrons generated in Pb-Pb collisions at $\sqrt{s_{NN}}$= 2.76 TeV and 5.02 TeV

  Salman Khurshid Malik, Ramni Gupta

  SciPost Phys. Proc. 15, 012 (2024) · published 2 April 2024 | Toggle abstract · pdf

  Local density fluctuations are expected to scale as a universal power-law when the system approaches critical point. Such power-law fluctuations are studied within the framework of intermittency through the measurement of normalized factorial moments in ($\eta$, $\phi$) phase space. Observations and results from the intermittency analysis performed for charged particles in Pb-Pb collisions using PYTHIA8/Angantyr at 2.76 TeV and 5.02 TeV are reported. We observe no scaling behaviour in the particle generation for any of the centrality studied in narrow p$_T$ bins. The scaling exponent $\nu$ shows no dependence on the centrality ranges.

• The $\pi^0$ mass and the first experimental verification of Coulomb de-excitation in pionic hydrogen

  M. Daum, P.-R. Kettle

  SciPost Phys. Proc. 5, 012 (2021) · published 6 September 2021 | Toggle abstract · pdf

  The most precise value for the $\pi^0$ mass was obtained from the measurement of the mass difference $m_{\pi^-}-m_{\pi^0} = 4.593\,64(48)$\,MeV/c$^2$ in the charge exchange reaction $\pi^-$p $\rightarrow \pi^0$n at PSI. With the most precise charged pion mass value, $m_{\pi^+} = 139.570\,21(14)$\,MeV/c$^2$ and the validity of the CPT theorem ($m_{\pi^-} = m_{\pi^+}$), a value $m_{\pi^0} = 134.976\,57(50)$\,MeV/c$^2$ is obtained. The measurements also revealed, for the first time, evidence of an unexpectedly large contribution from Coulomb de-excitation states during the pionic atom cascade.

• All about the neutron from lattice QCD

  Rajan Gupta

  SciPost Phys. Proc. 15, 021 (2024) · published 3 April 2024 | Toggle abstract · pdf

  I describe how simulations of lattice QCD using the path integral formulation provide the two basic quantum mechanical properties of QCD, its ground state in which correlation functions are calculated, and Fock state wavefunctions between which matrix elements of operators are calculated. Both constructs are stochastic, so unfortunately one gets no intuitive picture or even qualitative understanding of what they look like, nevertheless they contain and display all the subtleties of the quantum field theory. Today, these simulations provide many quantities that are impacting phenomenology and experiments. I illustrate the methods and the steps in the analysis using, as examples, three observables: the isovector charges of the nucleon, the contribution of the quark's intrinsic spin to the nucleon spin, and the pion-nucleon sigma term.

• Area law and OPE blocks in conformal field theory

  Jiang Long

  SciPost Phys. Proc. 4, 013 (2021) · published 13 August 2021 | Toggle abstract · pdf

  This is an introduction to the relationship between area law and OPE blocks in conformal field theory.

• Scaling laws of shrinkage induced fragmentation phenomena

  Roland Szatmári, Akio Nakahara, So Kitsunezaki, Ferenc Kun

  SciPost Phys. 19, 142 (2025) · published 1 December 2025 | Toggle abstract · pdf

  We investigate the shrinkage induced breakup of thin layers of heterogeneous materials attached to a substrate, a ubiquitous natural phenomenon with a wide range of potential applications. Focusing on the evolution of the fragment ensemble, we demonstrate that the system has two distinct phases: damage phase, where the layer is cracked, however, a dominant piece persists retaining the structural integrity of the layer, and a fragmentation phase, where the layer disintegrates into numerous small pieces. Based on finite size scaling we show that the transition between the two phases occurs at a critical damage analogous to continuous phase transitions. At the critical point a fully connected crack network emerges whose structure is controlled by the strength of adhesion to the substrate. In the strong adhesion limit, damage arises from random microcrack nucleation, resembling bond percolation, while weak adhesion facilitates stress concentration and the growth of cracks to large extensions. The critical exponents of the damage to fragmentation transition agree to a reasonable accuracy with those of two-dimensional bond percolation. Our findings provide a novel insights into the mechanism of shrinkage-induced cracking revealing generic scaling laws of the phenomenon.