Publications

Order by: publication date number of citations

• Studying hadronization at LHCb

  Sookhyun Lee

  SciPost Phys. Proc. 8, 075 (2022) · published 12 July 2022 | Toggle abstract · pdf

  LHCb is a fully instrumented forward spectrometer with particle identification and muon reconstruction covering the pseudorapidity ($eta$) range from 2 to 5. Its full jet reconstruc- tion capability makes the LHCb experiment a suitable venue to explore jet substructure observables, particularly formation of hadrons and heavy quarkonia resonances inside jets. This contribution presents a brief overview of ongoing research program and dis- cusses recent results on non-identified charged hadron distributions in Z-tagged jets and charmonium distributions within jets. Future works towards furthering the knowledge of hadronizion are also discussed.

• What charged cosmic rays tell us on dark matter

  Pierre Salati

  SciPost Phys. Proc. 12, 067 (2023) · published 5 July 2023 | Toggle abstract · pdf

  Dark matter particles could be the major component of the haloes of galaxies. Their mutual annihilations or decays would produce an indirect signature under the form of high-energy cosmic-rays. The focus of this presentation is on antimatter species, a component so rare that any excess over the background should be easily detected. After a recap on Galactic propagation, I will discuss positrons, antiprotons and anti-nuclei. For each of these species, anomalies have been reported. The antiproton excess, for instance, is currently a hot topic. Alas, it does not resist a correct treatment of theoretical and data errors.

• Overview of quarkonium production with ALICE at the LHC

  Hushnud Hushnud on behalf of the ALICE collaboration

  SciPost Phys. Proc. 13, 007 (2023) · published 28 September 2023 | Toggle abstract · pdf

  ALICE is a general purpose experiment designed to investigate nucleus-nucleus collisions at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), located at CERN. The ALICE detector is optimized for the reconstruction of quarkonia through the dimuon decay channel at foward rapidity as well as the dielectron decay channel at midrapidity. In this contribution, quarkonium measurements performed by the ALICE collaboration at both midrapidity and forward rapidity for various energies and colliding systems (pp, p-Pb and Pb-Pb), will be discussed and compared to theory.

• ATLAS results on charmonium production

  Vato Kartvelishvili

  SciPost Phys. Proc. 8, 014 (2022) · published 11 July 2022 | Toggle abstract · pdf

  An overview is given of the results on charmonium production obtained by the ATLAS collaboration at the LHC. Recent preliminary measurements covering prompt and non-prompt production of $J/\psi$ and $\psi(2S)$ states in the range of high transverse momenta from 60 to 360~GeV are highlighted.

• Many bounded versions of undecidable problems are NP-hard

  Andreas Klingler, Mirte van der Eyden, Sebastian Stengele, Tobias Reinhart, Gemma de las Cuevas

  SciPost Phys. 14, 173 (2023) · published 29 June 2023 | Toggle abstract · pdf

  Several physically inspired problems have been proven undecidable; examples are the spectral gap problem and the membership problem for quantum correlations. Most of these results rely on reductions from a handful of undecidable problems, such as the halting problem, the tiling problem, the Post correspondence problem or the matrix mortality problem. All these problems have a common property: they have an NP-hard bounded version. This work establishes a relation between undecidable unbounded problems and their bounded NP-hard versions. Specifically, we show that NP-hardness of a bounded version follows easily from the reduction of the unbounded problems. This leads to new and simpler proofs of the NP-hardness of bounded version of the Post correspondence problem, the matrix mortality problem, the positivity of matrix product operators, the reachability problem, the tiling problem, and the ground state energy problem. This work sheds light on the intractability of problems in theoretical physics and on the computational consequences of bounding a parameter.

• The droplet formation-dissolution transition in different ensembles: Finite-size scaling from two perspectives

  Franz Paul Spitzner, Johannes Zierenberg, Wolfhard Janke

  SciPost Phys. 5, 062 (2018) · published 13 December 2018 | Toggle abstract · pdf

  The formation and dissolution of a droplet is an important mechanism related to various nucleation phenomena. Here, we address the droplet formation-dissolution transition in a two-dimensional Lennard-Jones gas to demonstrate a consistent finite-size scaling approach from two perspectives using orthogonal control parameters. For the canonical ensemble, this means that we fix the temperature while varying the density and vice versa. Using specialised parallel multicanonical methods for both cases, we confirm analytical predictions at fixed temperature (rigorously only proven for lattice systems) and corresponding scaling predictions from expansions at fixed density. Importantly, our methodological approach provides us with reference quantities from the grand canonical ensemble that enter the analytical predictions. Our orthogonal finite-size scaling setup can be exploited for theoretical and experimental investigations of general nucleation phenomena - if one identifies the corresponding reference ensemble and adapts the theory accordingly. In this case, our numerical approach can be readily translated to the corresponding ensembles and thereby proves very useful for numerical studies of equilibrium droplet formation, in general.

• Systematically constructing the likelihood for boosted $H\to gg$ decays

  Andrew J. Larkoski

  SciPost Phys. 18, 130 (2025) · published 17 April 2025 | Toggle abstract · pdf

  We study the binary discrimination problem of identification of boosted $H\to gg$ decays from massive QCD jets in a systematic expansion in the strong coupling. Though this decay mode of the Higgs is unlikely to be discovered at the LHC, we analytically demonstrate several features of the likelihood ratio for this problem through explicit analysis of signal and background matrix elements. Through leading-order, we prove that by imposing a constraint on the jet mass and measuring the energy fraction of the softer subjet an improvement of signal to background ratio that is independent of the kinematics of the jets at high boosts can be obtained, and is approximately equal to the inverse of the strong coupling evaluated at the Higgs mass. At next-to-leading order, we construct a powerful discrimination observable through a sort of anomaly detection approach by simply inverting the next-to-leading order $H\to gg$ matrix element with soft gluon emission, which is naturally infrared and collinear safe. Our analytic conclusions are validated in simulated data from all-purpose event generators and subsequent parton showering and demonstrate that the signal-to-background ratio can be improved by a factor of several hundred at high, but accessible, jet energies at the LHC.

• Flavor deformations and supersymmetry enhancement in $4d$ $\mathcal{N}=2$ theories

  Usman Naseer, Charles Thull

  SciPost Phys. 13, 058 (2022) · published 21 September 2022 | Toggle abstract · pdf

  We study $\mathcal{N}=2$ theories on four-dimensional manifolds that admit a Killing vector $v$ with isolated fixed points. It is possible to deform these theories by coupling position-dependent background fields to the flavor current multiplet. The partition function of the deformed theory only depends on the value of the background scalar fields at the fixed points of $v$. For a single adjoint hypermultiplet, the partition function becomes independent of the supergravity as well as the flavor background if the scalars attain special values at the fixed points. For these special values, supersymmetry at the fixed points enhances from the Donaldson-Witten twist to the Marcus twist or the Vafa-Witten twist of $\mathcal{N}=4$ SYM. Our results explain the recently observed squashing independence of $\mathcal{N}=2^*$ theory on the squashed sphere and provide a new squashing independent point. Interpreted through the AGT-correspondence, this implies the $b$-independence of torus one-point functions of certain local operators in Liouville/Toda CFT. The position-dependent deformations imply relations between correlators of partially integrated operators in any $\mathcal{N}=2$ SCFT with flavor symmetries.

• Topological dynamics of adiabatic cat states

  Jacquelin Luneau, Benoît Douçot, David Carpentier

  SciPost Phys. 17, 112 (2024) · published 14 October 2024 | Toggle abstract · pdf

  We consider a quantum topological frequency converter, realized by coupling a qubit to two slow harmonic modes. The dynamics of such a system is the quantum analog of topological pumping. Our quantum mechanical description shows that an initial state generically evolves into a superposition of two adiabatic states. The topological nature of the coupling between the qubit and the modes splits these two components apart in energy: for each component, an energy transfer at a quantized rate occurs between the two quantum modes, in opposite directions for the two components, reminiscent of the topological pumping. We denote such a superposition of two quantum adiabatic states distinguishable through measures of the modes' energy an adiabatic cat state. We show that the topological coupling enhances the entanglement between the qubit and the modes, and we unveil the role of the quantum or Fubini-Study metric in the characterization of this entanglement.

• Probing valley phenomena with gate-defined valley splitters

  Juan Daniel Torres Luna, Kostas Vilkelis, Antonio L. R. Manesco

  SciPost Phys. 18, 062 (2025) · published 21 February 2025 | Toggle abstract · pdf

  Despite many reports of valley-related phenomena in graphene and its multilayers, current transport experiments cannot probe valley phenomena without the application of external fields. Here we propose a gate-defined valley splitter as a direct transport probe for valley phenomenon in graphene multilayers. First, we show how the device works, its magnetotransport response, and its robustness against fabrication errors. Secondly, we present two applications for valley splitters: (i) resonant tunneling of quantum dots probed by a valley splitter shows the valley polarization of dot levels; (ii) a combination of two valley splitters resolves the nature of order parameters in mesoscopic samples.