Publications

Order by: publication date number of citations

• Monopole breaking of Chern-Weil symmetries

  Eduardo García-Valdecasas, Matthew Reece, Motoo Suzuki

  SciPost Phys. 18, 162 (2025) · published 20 May 2025 | Toggle abstract · pdf

  Gauge theories in $d$ dimensions with a nontrivial fundamental group admit a $(d-3)$-form magnetic symmetry and a $(d-5)$-form instantonic symmetry. These are examples of Chern-Weil symmetries, with conserved currents built out of the gauge field strength, which can only be explicitly broken through violations of the Bianchi identity. For U(1) gauge theory, it is clear that magnetic monopoles violate not only the $(d-3)$-form magnetic symmetry but also lower-form symmetries like the instantonic symmetry. It is also known that an improved instanton number symmetry current, which is conserved, can be constructed in the case that the magnetic monopole admits a dyonic excitation. We study the generalization to other gauge groups, showing that magnetic monopoles also violate instantonic symmetries for nonabelian groups like PSU($n$), and that dyon modes can restore such symmetries. Furthermore, we show that in many (but not all) examples where a gauge group $G$ is Higgsed to a gauge group $H$, the structure of monopoles and dyons emerging from the Higgsing process explicitly breaks the instantonic symmetries of $H$ to those of $G$. The meaning of explicit breaking of a $(d-5)$-form symmetry is clearest for $d > 4$, but these results also extend to $d = 4$, where the breaking is interpreted as an obstruction to coupling the theory to a background axion field.

• Recent Highlights on Higgs Physics from the LHC

  Elisabeth Schopf

  SciPost Phys. Proc. 8, 001 (2022) · published 11 July 2022 | Toggle abstract · pdf

  Many of the Higgs boson production and decay channels, predicted by the StandardModel, have been observed since its 2012 discovery. Today, measurements of the Higgsboson’s properties in these channels deepen our understanding of the nature of thisfundamental particle by providing better information about its mass, production kine-matics, and CP structure. Increasing precision also enables targeting rare Higgs bosondecay modes and probing di-Higgs-boson production. In addition, searches for beyondStandard Model physics in the Higgs sector are performed. This article presents the lat-est Higgs boson measurement highlights from the ATLAS and CMS collaborations usingLHC proton-proton collision data at a centre of mass energy of 13 TeV.

• Lepton flavor violation with tau leptons

  Julian Heeck

  SciPost Phys. Proc. 17, 005 (2025) · published 23 July 2025 | Toggle abstract · pdf

  We review the status and importance of lepton flavor violation with tauons, focusing on overlooked flavor-breaking patterns as well as tau-flavor violation in nucleon decays.

• The diagrammatic coaction and cuts of the double box

  Einan Gardi, Aris Ioannou

  SciPost Phys. Proc. 7, 012 (2022) · published 20 June 2022 | Toggle abstract · pdf

  The diagrammatic coaction encodes the analytic structure of Feynman integrals by mapping any given Feynman diagram into a tensor product of diagrams defined by contractions and cuts of the original diagram. Feynman integrals evaluate to generalized hypergeometric functions in dimensional regularization. Establishing the coaction on this type of functions has helped formulating and checking the diagrammatic coaction of certain two-loop integrals. In this talk we study its application on the fully massless double box diagram. We make use of differential equation techniques, which, together with the properties of homology and cohomology theory of the resulting hypergeometric functions, allow us to formulate the coaction on a range of cuts of the double box in closed form.

• Vacua, symmetries, and Higgsing of Chern-Simons matter theories

  Fabio Marino, Marcus Sperling

  SciPost Phys. 18, 174 (2025) · published 3 June 2025 | Toggle abstract · pdf

  Three-dimensional supersymmetric Chern–Simons matter (CSM) theories typically preserve $\mathcal{N}=3$ supersymmetry but can exhibit enhanced $\mathcal{N}=4$ supersymmetry under special conditions. A detailed understanding of the moduli space of CSM theories, however, has remained elusive. This paper addresses this gap by systematically analysing the maximal branches of the moduli space of $\mathcal{N}=3$ and $\mathcal{N}=4$ CSM realised via Type IIB brane constructions. Firstly, for $\mathcal{N}=4$ theories with Chern–Simons levels equal $1$, the $SL(2,\mathbb{Z})$ dualisation algorithm is employed to construct dual Lagrangian 3d $\mathcal{N}=4$ theories without CS terms. This allows the full moduli space to be determined using quiver algorithms that compute Higgs and Coulomb branch Hasse diagrams and associated RG flows. Secondly, for $\mathcal{N}=4$ theories with CS-levels greater $1$, where $SL(2,\mathbb{Z})$ dualisation does not yield CS-free Lagrangians, a new prescription is introduced to derive two magnetic quivers, $\mathsf{MQ}_A $ and $\mathsf{MQ}_B$, whose Coulomb branches capture the maximal A and B branches of the original $\mathcal{N}=4$ CSM theory. Applying the decay and fission algorithm to $ \mathsf{MQ}_{A/B}$ then enables the systematic analysis of A/B branch RG flows and their geometric structures. Thirdly, for $\mathcal{N}=3$ CSM theories, one magnetic quiver for each maximal (hyper-Kähler) branch is derived from the brane system. This provides an efficient and comprehensive characterisation of these previously scarcely studied features.

• Sub-TeV hadronic interaction model differences and their impact on air showers

  Michael Schmelling, Álvaro Pastor-Gutiérrez, Harm Schorlemmer, Robert Daniel Parsons

  SciPost Phys. Proc. 15, 015 (2024) · published 2 April 2024 | Toggle abstract · pdf

  In the sub-TeV regime, the most widely used hadronic interaction models disagree significantly in their predictions of particle spectra from cosmic ray induced air showers. We investigate the nature and impact of model uncertainties, focussing on air shower primaries with energies around the transition between high and low energy hadronic interaction models, where the dissimilarities are largest and which constitute the bulk of the interactions in air showers.

• Exclusive electro-weak production of a charmed meson at high energy

  B. Pire, L. Szymanowski, J. Wagner

  SciPost Phys. Proc. 8, 150 (2022) · published 14 July 2022 | Toggle abstract · pdf

  Exclusive electro-weak processes have peculiar features which make them complementary to usually discussed deeply virtual electroproduction processes such as deep virtual Compton scattering or meson production (and the corresponding crossed reactions). They allow in particular single charmed meson production, which we study in two different contexts : electroproduction at an electron ion collider and neutrino-production at a medium energy neutrino facility. We rely on the QCD collinear factorization framework where generalized parton distributions allow physicists to perform a nucleon tomography.

• Spin Density Matrix Elements for Exclusive $\rho^{0}$ Meson Muoproduction at COMPASS

  W.~Augustyniak

  SciPost Phys. Proc. 8, 073 (2022) · published 12 July 2022 | Toggle abstract · pdf

  Spin density matrix elements were extracted from COMPASS data for exclusive $\rho^{0}$ meson muoproduction on a liquid hydrogen target. The measurement cover the kinematic range of 1.0 (GeV/$c$)$^2$ $< Q^{2} <$ 10.0 (GeV/$c$)$^2$, 5.0 GeV/$c^2$ $< W <$ 17.0 GeV/$c^2$ and 0.01 (GeV/$c$)$^2$ $<p^{2}_{T} < $ 0.5 (GeV/$c$)$^2$. Here, $W$ denotes the mass of the final hadronic system, $Q^{2}$ the virtuality of the exchanged photon and $p_{T}$ the transverse momentum of the $\rho^{0}$ meson with respect to the virtual-photon direction. We observe a violation of s-channel helicity conservation for the transition $\gamma^{*}_{T} \to \rho^{0}_{L}$. Additionally, we find a dominant contribution of the natural-parity-exchange transitions.

• Electric and magnetic tau dipole moments revisited

  G. A. González-Sprinberg

  SciPost Phys. Proc. 17, 004 (2025) · published 23 July 2025 | Toggle abstract · pdf

  Precise measurements of magnetic and electric dipole moments are important tests of the Standard Model and beyond Standard Model physics, particularly for the electron and the muon. However, the situation presents distinctive challenges when dealing with the tau lepton due to its very short lifetime and relatively high mass. Here, we review the theoretical predictions and experimental measurements of both the anomalous magnetic and electric dipole moments of the tau lepton.

• Witten index of BMN matrix quantum mechanics

  Chi-Ming Chang

  SciPost Phys. 19, 147 (2025) · published 5 December 2025 | Toggle abstract · pdf

  We compute the Witten index of the Berenstein-Maldacena-Nastase matrix quantum mechanics, which counts the number of ground states as well as the difference between the numbers of bosonic and fermionic BPS states with nonzero angular momenta. The Witten index sets a lower bound on the entropy, which exhibits $N^2$ growth that provides strong evidence for the existence of BPS black holes in M-theory, asymptotic to the plane-wave geometry. We also discuss a relation between the Witten index in the infinite $N$ limit and the superconformal index of the Aharony-Bergman-Jafferis-Maldacena theory.