Publications

Order by: publication date number of citations

• The WIMP paradigm: Theme and variations

  Jonathan L. Feng

  SciPost Phys. Lect. Notes 71 (2023) · published 13 June 2023 | Toggle abstract · pdf

  WIMPs, ↑ weakly-interacting massive particles, have been leading candidates for particle dark matter for decades, and they remain a viable and highly motivated possibility. In these lectures, I describe the basic motivations for WIMPs, beginning with the WIMP miracle and its under-appreciated cousin, the discrete WIMP miracle. I then give an overview of some of the basic features of WIMPs and how to find them. These lectures conclude with some variations on the WIMP theme that have by now become significant topics in their own right and illustrate the richness of the WIMP paradigm.

  3 citations

• Black hole mirages: Electron lensing and Berry curvature effects in inhomogeneously tilted Weyl semimetals

  Andreas Haller, Suraj Hegde, Chen Xu, Christophe De Beule, Thomas L. Schmidt, Tobias Meng

  SciPost Phys. 14, 119 (2023) · published 17 May 2023 | Toggle abstract · pdf

  We study electronic transport in Weyl semimetals with spatially varying nodal tilt profiles. We find that the flow of electrons can be guided precisely by judiciously chosen tilt profiles. In a broad regime of parameters, we show that electron flow is described well by semiclassical equations of motion similar to the ones governing gravitational attraction. This analogy provides a physically transparent tool for designing tiltronic devices like electronic lenses. The analogy to gravity circumvents the notoriously difficult full-fledged description of inhomogeneous solids. A comparison to microscopic lattice simulations shows that it is only valid for trajectories sufficiently far from analogue black holes. We finally comment on the Berry curvature-driven transverse motion and relate the latter to spin precession physics.

  4 citations

• Holographic thermal correlators from supersymmetric instantons

  Matthew Dodelson, Alba Grassi, Cristoforo Iossa, Daniel Panea Lichtig, Alexander Zhiboedov

  SciPost Phys. 14, 116 (2023) · published 16 May 2023 | Toggle abstract · pdf

  We present an exact formula for the thermal scalar two-point function in four-dimensional holographic conformal field theories. The problem of finding it reduces to the analysis of the wave equation on the AdS-Schwarzschild background. The two-point function is computed from the connection coefficients of the Heun equation, which can be expressed in terms of the Nekrasov-Shatashvili partition function of an $SU(2)$ supersymmetric gauge theory with four fundamental hypermultiplets. The result is amenable to numerical evaluation upon truncating the number of instantons in the convergent expansion of the partition function. We also examine it analytically in various limits. At large spin the instanton expansion of the thermal two-point function directly maps to the light-cone bootstrap analysis of the heavy-light four-point function. Using this connection, we compute the OPE data of heavy-light double-twist operators. We compare our prediction to the perturbative results available in the literature and find perfect agreement.

  17 citations

• A tail of eternal inflation

  Timothy Cohen, Daniel Green, Akhil Premkumar

  SciPost Phys. 14, 109 (2023) · published 12 May 2023 | Toggle abstract · pdf

  Non-trivial inflaton self-interactions can yield calculable signatures of primordial non-Gaussianity that are measurable in cosmic surveys. We calculate the non-Gaussian corrections to Stochastic Inflation within the framework of Soft de Sitter Effective Theory, from which we derive the associated probability distribution for the scalar fluctuations. As a consequence of this new result, we show that the phase transition to slow-roll eternal inflation is often incalculable in these models. Instead, this transition is sensitive to the non-Gaussian tail of the distribution of scalar fluctuations, which probes physics inside the horizon, potentially beyond the cutoff scale of the Effective Field Theory of Inflation. We delineate the parameter space consistent with current observations and weak coupling at horizon crossing in which the large fluctuations relevant for eternal inflation can only be determined by appealing to a UV completion. We also argue that this breakdown of the perturbative description is required for the de Sitter entropy to reflect the number of de Sitter microstates.

  2 citations

• Universal Gibbons-Hawking-York term for theories with curvature, torsion and non-metricity

  Johanna Erdmenger, Bastian Heß, Ioannis Matthaiakakis, René Meyer

  SciPost Phys. 14, 099 (2023) · published 8 May 2023 | Toggle abstract · pdf

  Motivated by establishing holographic renormalization for gravitational theories with non-metricity and torsion, we present a new and efficient general method for calculating Gibbons-Hawking-York (GHY) terms. Our method consists of linearizing any nonlinearity in curvature, torsion or non-metricity by introducing suitable Lagrange multipliers. Moreover, we use a split formalism for differential forms, writing them in $(n-1)+1$ dimensions. The boundary terms of the action are manifest in this formalism by means of Stokes' theorem, such that the compensating GHY term for the Dirichlet problem may be read off directly. We observe that only those terms in the Lagrangian that contain curvature contribute to the GHY term. Terms polynomial solely in torsion and non-metricity do not require any GHY term compensation for the variational problem to be well-defined. We test our method by confirming existing results for Einstein-Hilbert and four-dimensional Chern-Simons modified gravity. Moreover, we obtain new results for torsionful Lovelock-Chern-Simons and metric-affine gravity. For all four examples, our new method and results contribute to a new approach towards a systematic hydrodynamic expansion for spin and hypermomentum currents within AdS/CFT.

  6 citations

• Density induced vacuum instability

  Reuven Balkin, Javi Serra, Konstantin Springmann, Stefan Stelzl, Andreas Weiler

  SciPost Phys. 14, 071 (2023) · published 14 April 2023 | Toggle abstract · pdf

  We consider matter density effects in theories with a false ground state. Large and dense systems, such as stars, can destabilize a metastable minimum and allow for the formation of bubbles of the true minimum. We derive the conditions under which these bubbles form, as well as the conditions under which they either remain confined to the dense region or escape to infinity. The latter case leads to a phase transition in the universe at star formation. We explore the phenomenological consequences of such seeded phase transitions.

  4 citations

• Chaos in the vicinity of a singularity in the three-body problem: The equilateral triangle experiment in the zero angular momentum limit

  Hugo D. Parischewsky, Alessandro A. Trani, Nathan W. C. Leigh

  SciPost Phys. Core 6, 016 (2023) · published 21 March 2023 | Toggle abstract · pdf

  We present numerical simulations of the gravitational three-body problem, in which three particles lie at rest close to the vertices of an equilateral triangle. In the unperturbed problem, the three particles fall towards the center of mass of the system to form a three-body collision, or singularity, where the particles overlap in space and time. By perturbing the initial positions of the particles, we are able to study chaos in the vicinity of the singularity. Here we cover both the singular region close to the unperturbed configuration and the binary-single scattering regime where one side of the triangle is very short compared to the other two. We make phase space plots to study the regular and ergodic subsets of our simulations and compare them with the outcomes expected from the statistical escape theory of the three-body problem. We further provide fits to the ergodic subset to characterize the properties of the left-over binaries. We identify the discrepancy between the statistical theory and the simulations in the regular subset of interactions, which only exhibits weak chaos. As we decrease the scale of the perturbations in the initial positions, the phase space becomes entirely dominated by regular interactions, according to our metric for chaos. Finally, we show the effect of general relativity corrections by simulating the same scenario with the inclusion of post-Newtonian corrections to the equations of motion.

  2 citations

• Hot and heavy dark matter from a weak scale phase transition

  Iason Baldes, Yann Gouttenoire, Filippo Sala

  SciPost Phys. 14, 033 (2023) · published 14 March 2023 | Toggle abstract · pdf

  We point out that dark matter which is produced non-adiabatically in a phase transition (PT) with fast bubble walls receives a boost in velocity which leads to long free-streaming lengths. We find that this could be observed via the suppressed matter power spectrum for dark matter masses around $\mathbf{ 10^8 - 10^9}$ GeV and energy scales of the PT around $\mathbf{ 10^{2} - 10^3}$ GeV. The PT should take place at the border of the supercooled regime, i.e. approximately when the Universe becomes vacuum dominated. This work offers novel physics goals for galaxy surveys, Lyman-$\alpha$, stellar stream, lensing, and 21-cm observations, and connects these to the gravitational waves from such phase transitions, and more speculatively to possible telescope signals of heavy dark matter decay.

  9 citations

• The double smeared null energy condition

  Jackson R. Fliss, Ben Freivogel, Eleni-Alexandra Kontou

  SciPost Phys. 14, 024 (2023) · published 27 February 2023 | Toggle abstract · pdf

  The null energy condition (NEC), an important assumption of the Penrose singularity theorem, is violated by quantum fields. The natural generalization of the NEC in quantum field theory, the renormalized null energy averaged over a finite null segment, is known to be unbounded from below. Here, we propose an alternative, the double smeared null energy condition (DSNEC), stating that the null energy smeared over two null directions has a finite lower bound. We rigorously derive DSNEC from general worldvolume bounds for free quantum fields in Minkowski spacetime. Our method allows for future systematic inclusion of curvature corrections. As a further application of the techniques we develop, we prove additional lower bounds on the expectation values of various operators such as conserved higher spin currents. DSNEC provides a natural starting point for proving singularity theorems in semi-classical gravity.

  1 citation

• On the Euclidean action of de Sitter black holes and constrained instantons

  Edward K. Morvan, Jan Pieter van der Schaar, Manus R. Visser

  SciPost Phys. 14, 022 (2023) · published 23 February 2023 | Toggle abstract · pdf

  We compute the on-shell Euclidean action of Schwarzschild-de Sitter black holes, and take their contributions in the gravitational path integral into account using the formalism of constrained instantons. Although Euclidean de Sitter black hole geometries have conical singularities for generic masses, their on-shell action is finite and is shown to be independent of the Euclidean time periodicity and equal to minus the sum of the black hole and cosmological horizon entropy. We apply this result to compute the probability for a nonrotating, neutral arbitrary mass black hole to nucleate spontaneously in empty de Sitter space, which separates into a constant and a "non-perturbative" contribution, the latter corresponding to the proper saddle-point instanton in the Nariai limit. We also speculate on some further applications of our results, most notably as potential non-perturbative corrections to correlators in the de Sitter vacuum.

  12 citations