Publications

Order by: publication date number of citations

• Testing new physics models with global comparisons to collider measurements: the Contur toolkit

  A. Buckley, J. M. Butterworth, L. Corpe, M. Habedank, D. Huang, D. Yallup, M. Altakach, G. Bassman, I. Lagwankar, J. Rocamonde, H. Saunders, B. Waugh, G. Zilgalvis

  SciPost Phys. Core 4, 013 (2021) · published 20 May 2021 | Toggle abstract · pdf

  Measurements at particle collider experiments, even if primarily aimed at understanding Standard Model processes, can have a high degree of model independence, and implicitly contain information about potential contributions from physics beyond the Standard Model. The Contur package allows users to benefit from the hundreds of measurements preserved in the Rivet library to test new models against the bank of LHC measurements to date. This method has proven to be very effective in several recent publications from the Contur team, but ultimately, for this approach to be successful, the authors believe that the Contur tool needs to be accessible to the wider high energy physics community. As such, this manual accompanies the first user-facing version: Contur v2. It describes the design choices that have been made, as well as detailing pitfalls and common issues to avoid. The authors hope that with the help of this documentation, external groups will be able to run their own Contur studies, for example when proposing a new model, or pitching a new search.

  25 citations

• EFT asymptotics: the growth of operator degeneracy

  Tom Melia, Sridip Pal

  SciPost Phys. 10, 104 (2021) · published 14 May 2021 | Toggle abstract · pdf

  We establish formulae for the asymptotic growth (with respect to the scaling dimension) of the number of operators in effective field theory, or equivalently the number of $S$-matrix elements, in arbitrary spacetime dimensions and with generic field content. This we achieve by generalising a theorem due to Meinardus and applying it to Hilbert series -- partition functions for the degeneracy of (subsets of) operators. Although our formulae are asymptotic, numerical experiments reveal remarkable agreement with exact results at very low orders in the EFT expansion, including for complicated phenomenological theories such as the standard model EFT. Our methods also reveal phase transition-like behaviour in Hilbert series. We discuss prospects for tightening the bounds and providing rigorous errors to the growth of operator degeneracy, and of extending the analytic study and utility of Hilbert series to EFT.

  20 citations

• On-shell effective theory for higher-spin dark matter

  Adam Falkowski, Giulia Isabella, Camila S. Machado

  SciPost Phys. 10, 101 (2021) · published 6 May 2021 | Toggle abstract · pdf

  We apply the on-shell amplitude techniques in the domain of dark matter. Without evoking fields and Lagrangians, an effective theory for a massive spin-$S$ particle is defined in terms of on-shell amplitudes, which are written down using the massive spinor formalism. This procedure greatly simplifies the study of theories with a higher-spin dark matter particle. In particular, it provides an efficient way to calculate the rates of processes controlling dark matter production, and offers better physical insight into how different processes depend on the relevant scales in the theory. We demonstrate the applicability of these methods by exploring two scenarios where higher-spin DM is produced via the freeze-in mechanism. One scenario is minimal, involving only universal gravitational interactions, and is compatible with dark matter masses in a very broad range from sub-TeV to the GUT scale. The other scenario involves direct coupling of higher-spin DM to the Standard Model via the Higgs intermediary, and leads to a rich phenomenology, including dark matter decay signatures.

  27 citations

• Technical comment on the paper of Dessert et al. "The dark matter interpretation of the 3.5 keV line is inconsistent with blank-sky observations"

  Alexey Boyarsky, Denys Malyshev, Oleg Ruchayskiy, Denys Savchenko

  SciPost Astro. Core 1, 001 (2021) · published 4 May 2021 | Toggle abstract · pdf

  An unidentified line at energy around 3.5 keV was detected in the spectra of dark matter-dominated objects. Recent work of Dessert et al. [1812.06976] used 30 Msec of XMM-Newton blank-sky observations to constrain the admissible line flux, challenging its dark matter decay origin. We demonstrate that these bounds are overestimated by more than an order of magnitude due to improper background modeling. Therefore the dark matter interpretation of the 3.5 keV signal remains viable.

  2 citations

• STrEAMlining EFT Matching

  Timothy Cohen, Xiaochuan Lu, Zhengkang Zhang

  SciPost Phys. 10, 098 (2021) · published 3 May 2021 | Toggle abstract · pdf

  This paper presents STrEAM (SuperTrace Evaluation Automated for Matching), a Mathematica package that calculates all functional supertraces which arise when matching a generic UV model onto a relativistic Effective Field Theory (EFT) at one loop and to arbitrary order in the heavy mass expansion. STrEAM implements the covariant derivative expansion to automate the most tedious step of the streamlined functional matching prescription presented in arXiv:2011.02484 . The code and an example notebook are available at https://www.github.com/EFTMatching/STrEAM .

  41 citations

• How to GAN Event Unweighting

  Mathias Backes, Anja Butter, Tilman Plehn, Ramon Winterhalder

  SciPost Phys. 10, 089 (2021) · published 23 April 2021 | Toggle abstract · pdf

  Event generation with neural networks has seen significant progress recently. The big open question is still how such new methods will accelerate LHC simulations to the level required by upcoming LHC runs. We target a known bottleneck of standard simulations and show how their unweighting procedure can be improved by generative networks. This can, potentially, lead to a very significant gain in simulation speed.

  29 citations

• Exploring jet substructure in semi-visible jets

  Deepak Kar, Sukanya Sinha

  SciPost Phys. 10, 084 (2021) · published 22 April 2021 | Toggle abstract · pdf

  Semi-visible jets arise in strongly interacting dark sectors, where parton evolution includes dark sector emissions, resulting in jets overlapping with missing transverse momentum. The implementation of semi-visible jets is done using the Pythia Hidden valley module to duplicate the QCD sector showering. In this work, several jet substructure observables have been examined to compare semi-visible jets and light quark/gluon jets. These comparisons were performed using different dark hadron fraction in the semi-visible jets (signal). The extreme scenarios where signal consists either of entirely dark hadrons or visible hadrons offers a chance to understand the effect of the specific dark shower model employed in these comparisons. We attempt to decouple the behaviour of jet-substructure observables due to inherent semi-visible jet properties, from model dependence owing to the existence of only one dark shower model as mentioned above.

  15 citations

• QMetrology from QCosmology: Study with entangled two qubit open quantum system in De Sitter space

  Sayantan Choudhury, Satyaki Chowdhury, Nitin Gupta, Abinash Swain

  SciPost Phys. Core 4, 006 (2021) · published 29 March 2021 | Toggle abstract · pdf

  In this paper, our prime objective is to apply the techniques of parameter estimation theory and the concept of Quantum Metrology in the form of Fisher Information to investigate the role of certain physical quantities in the open quantum dynamics of a two entangled qubit system under the Markovian approximation. There exist various physical parameters which characterize such system, but can not be treated as any quantum mechanical observable. It becomes imperative to do a detailed parameter estimation analysis to determine the physically consistent parameter space of such quantities. We apply both Classical Fisher Information (CFI) and Quantum Fisher Information (QFI) to correctly estimate these parameters, which play significant role to describe the out-of-equilibrium and the long range quantum entanglement phenomena of open quantum system. Quantum Metrology, compared to classical parameter estimation theory, plays a two-fold superior role, improving the precision and accuracy of parameter estimation. Additionally, in this paper we present a new avenue in terms of Quantum Metrology, which beats the classical parameter estimation. We also present an interesting result of revival of out-of-equilibrium feature at the late time scales, arising due to the long range quantum entanglement at early time scale and provide a physical interpretation for the same in terms of Bell's Inequality Violation in early time scale giving rise to non-locality.

  4 citations

• Neutrino experiments probe hadrophilic light dark matter

  Yohei Ema, Filippo Sala, Ryosuke Sato

  SciPost Phys. 10, 072 (2021) · published 24 March 2021 | Toggle abstract · pdf

  We use Super-K data to place new strong limits on interactions of sub-GeV Dark Matter (DM) with nuclei, that rely on the DM flux inevitably induced by cosmic-ray upscatterings. We derive analogous sensitivities at Hyper-K and DUNE and compare them with others, e.g. at JUNO. Using simplified models, we find that our proposal tests genuinely new parameter space, allowed both by theoretical consistency and by other direct detection experiments, cosmology, meson decays and our recast of monojet. Our results thus motivate and shape a new physics case for any large volume detector sensitive to nuclear recoils.

  42 citations

• Testing the mechanism of lepton compositeness

  Vincenzo Afferrante, Axel Maas, René Sondenheimer, Pascal Törek

  SciPost Phys. 10, 062 (2021) · published 10 March 2021 | Toggle abstract · pdf

  Strict gauge invariance requires that physical left-handed leptons are actually bound states of the elementary left-handed lepton doublet and the Higgs field within the standard model. That they nonetheless behave almost like pure elementary particles is explained by the Fr\"ohlich-Morchio-Strocchi mechanism. Using lattice gauge theory, we test and confirm this mechanism for fermions. Though, due to the current inaccessibility of non-Abelian gauged Weyl fermions on the lattice, a model which contains vectorial leptons but which obeys all other relevant symmetries has been simulated.

  4 citations