Publications

Order by: publication date number of citations

• Light sterile neutrinos: a critical overview

  Ivan Esteban

  SciPost Phys. Proc. 1, 026 (2019) · published 20 February 2019 | Toggle abstract · pdf

  Light sterile neutrinos, first proposed after the results of the LSND experiment, have been a polemical topic for the last decades after seemingly contradictory data appeared from different experiments. In this overview, I review the experimental hints that point towards sterile neutrinos as well as their statistical compatibility. Even though the muon neutrino disappearance experiments strongly rule out vanilla sterile neutrinos, each oscillation channel remains internally mostly consistent. In any case, in the near future a series of independent and precise experiments should finally settle down this issue.

• Updated results on the cosmic ray energy spectrum and composition from the GRAPES-3 experiment

  F. Varsi, S. Ahmad, M. Chakraborty, A. Chandra, S. R. Dugad, U. D. Goswami, S. K. Gupta, B. Hariharan, Y. Hayashi, P. Jagadeesan, A. Jain , P. Jain, S. Kawakami, H. Kojima, S. Mahapatra, P. K. Mohanty, R. Moharana, Y. Muraki, P. K. Nayak, T. Nonaka, A. Oshima, B. P. Pant, D. Pattanaik, G. Pradhan, M. Rameez, K. Ramesh, L. V. Reddy, R. Sahoo, R. Scaria, S. Shibata, K. Tanaka, M. Zuberi

  SciPost Phys. Proc. 13, 031 (2023) · published 29 September 2023 | Toggle abstract · pdf

  Here, we present the updated results on the cosmic ray energy spectrum and composition analysis from the GRAPES-3 experiment over the energy range of 50 TeV to 1000 TeV since ICRC 2021. The simulation of cosmic ray showers was performed using the post-LHC high energy hadronic interaction model QGSJetII-04 and low energy hadronic model FLUKA. A detailed GEANT4 simulation of the GRAPES-3 muon telescope was performed. The composition was obtained by fitting simulated muon multiplicity distributions for proton, helium, nitrogen, aluminium, and iron primaries to the observed data. The energy spectrum connects to the direct measurements with a fairly good agreement in flux.

• Symmetry-enforced minimal entanglement and correlation in quantum spin chains

  Kangle Li, Liujun Zou

  SciPost Phys. 19, 020 (2025) · published 17 July 2025 | Toggle abstract · pdf

  The interplay between symmetry, entanglement and correlation is an interesting and important topic in quantum many-body physics. Within the framework of matrix product states, in this paper we study the minimal entanglement and correlation enforced by the $SO(3)$ spin rotation symmetry and lattice translation symmetry in a quantum spin-$J$ chain, with $J$ a positive integer. When neither symmetry is spontaneously broken, for a sufficiently long segment in a sufficiently large closed chain, we find that the minimal Rényi-$\alpha$ entropy compatible with these symmetries is $\min\{ -\frac{2}{\alpha-1}\ln(\frac{1}{2^\alpha}({1+\frac{1}{(2J+1)^{\alpha-1}}})), 2\ln(J+1) \}$, for any $\alpha∈\mathbb{R}^+$. In an infinitely long open chain with such symmetries, for any $\alpha∈\mathbb{R}^+$ the minimal Rényi-$\alpha$ entropy of half of the system is $\min\{ -\frac{1}{\alpha-1}\ln(\frac{1}{2^\alpha}({1+\frac{1}{(2J+1)^{\alpha-1}}})), \ln(J+1) \}$. When $\alpha→ 1$, these lower bounds give the symmetry-enforced minimal von Neumann entropies in these setups. Moreover, we show that no state in a quantum spin-$J$ chain with these symmetries can have a vanishing correlation length. Interestingly, the states with the minimal entanglement may not be a state with the minimal correlation length.

• Interaction and collision of skyrmions in chiral antiferromagnets

  George Theodorou, Bruno Barton-Singer, Stavros Komineas

  SciPost Phys. 18, 037 (2025) · published 30 January 2025 | Toggle abstract · pdf

  Skyrmions in an antiferromagnet can travel as solitary waves in stark contrast to the situation in ferromagnets. Traveling skyrmion solutions have been found numerically in chiral antiferromagnets. We study head-on collision events between two skyrmions. We find that the result of the collision depends on the initial velocity of the skyrmions. For small velocities, the skyrmions shrink as they approach, then bounce back and eventually acquire almost their initial speed. For larger velocities, the skyrmions approach each other and shrink until they become singular points at some finite separation and are eventually annihilated. Considering skyrmion energetics, we can determine the regimes of the different dynamical behaviors. Using a collective co-ordinate approach, we reproduce the dynamics of the collisions including the variation of the size of the skyrmions and collapse above a critical velocity.

• 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.

• Random matrices and the free energy of Ising-like models with disorder

  Nils Gluth, Thomas Guhr, Alfred Hucht

  SciPost Phys. 17, 122 (2024) · published 30 October 2024 | Toggle abstract · pdf

  We consider an Ising model with quenched surface disorder, the disorder average of the free energy is the main object of interest. Explicit expressions for the free energy distribution are difficult to obtain if the quenched surface spins take values of $± 1$. Thus, we choose a different approach and model the surface disorder by Gaussian random matrices. The distribution of the free energy is calculated. We chose skew-circulant random matrices and analytically compute the characteristic function of the free energy distribution. From the characteristic function we numerically calculate the distribution and show that it becomes log-normal for sufficiently large dimensions of the disorder matrices, and in the limit of infinitely large matrices tends to a Gaussian. Furthermore, we establish a connection to the central limit theorem.

• Update on the angular resolution of GRAPES-3 experiment based on Moon shadow analysis

  D. Pattanaik, S. Ahmad, M. Chakraborty, S. R. Dugad, U. D. Goswami, S. K. Gupta, B. Hariharan, Y. Hayashi, P. Jagadeesan, A. Jain, P. Jain, S. Kawakami, H. Kojima, S. Mahapatra, P. K. Mohanty, R. Moharana, Y. Muraki, P. K. Nayak, T. Nonaka, A. Oshima, B. P. Pant, M. Rameez, K. Ramesh, L. V. Reddy, S. Shibata, F. Varsi, M. Zuberi

  SciPost Phys. Proc. 13, 033 (2023) · published 29 September 2023 | Toggle abstract · pdf

  GRAPES-3 is an extensive air shower array located at Ooty (11.6$^\circ$N, 76.7$^\circ$E, 2200 m a.s.l.) in southern India. Recently, the angular resolution of the GRAPES-3 array has been improved by correcting the shower front curvature based on the shower size and age. Here, we present the results of the angular resolution and pointing accuracy of the array through observation of the Moon shadow. We have analyzed the data for the period of 2014-2016 containing $\sim$ 3$×$10$^9$ air shower events with a median energy of 15 TeV. A significant improvement in the angular resolution has been observed compared to the earlier analysis by the group through the Moon shadow method and is comparable to the arrays located at a 2 km higher altitude than the GRAPES-3 experiment.

• The Soft Anomalous Dimension at four loops in the Regge Limit

  Niamh Maher, Giulio Falcioni, Einan Gardi, Calum Milloy, Leonardo Vernazza

  SciPost Phys. Proc. 7, 013 (2022) · published 20 June 2022 | Toggle abstract · pdf

  The soft anomalous dimension governs the infrared divergences of scattering amplitudes in general kinematics to all orders in perturbation theory. By comparing the recent Regge-limit results for $2\to2$ scattering (through Next-to-Next-to-Leading Logarithms) in full colour to a general form for the soft anomalous dimension at four loops we derive powerful constraints on its kinematic dependence, opening the way for a bootstrap-based determination.

• pySecDec as a tool for expansion by regions and loop amplitude evaluation

  Emilio Villa

  SciPost Phys. Proc. 7, 014 (2022) · published 20 June 2022 | Toggle abstract · pdf

  We present the new release of pySecDec, a toolbox for the evaluation of dimensionally regulated parameter integrals. The main new features consist of an automated way to perform expansions, based on the geometric approach to the method of expansion by regions, and a new algorithm to efficiently evaluate linear combinations of integrals as needed for the calculation of scattering amplitudes. The other new features are also summarised briefly.

• BV formalism and partition functions

  Pietro Antonio Grassi, Ondrej Hulik

  SciPost Phys. 18, 202 (2025) · published 23 June 2025 | Toggle abstract · pdf

  The BV formalism is a well-established method for analyzing symmetries and quantizing field theories. In this paper, we use BV formalism to derive partition functions and the space of gauge invariant operators implementing the equations of motions and their redundancies for selected theories. We discuss various interpretations of the results, some dualities, and relation to the first quantized models.