Cosmic-ray acceleration processes in astrophysical plasmas are often investigated with fully-kinetic or hybrid kinetic numerical simulations, which enable us to describe a detailed microphysics of particle energization mechanisms. Tracing of individual particles in such simulations is especially useful in this regard. However, visually inspecting particle trajectories introduces a significant amount of bias and uncertainty, making it challenging to pinpoint specific acceleration mechanisms. Here, we present a novel approach utilising neural networks to assist in the analysis of individual particle data. We demonstrate the effectiveness of this approach using the dataset from our recent particle-in-cell (PIC) simulations of non-relativistic perpendicular shocks that consists of 252,000 electrons, each characterised by their position, momentum and electromagnetic field at particle's position, recorded in a time series of 1200 time steps. These electrons cross a region affected by the electrostatic Buneman instability, and a small percentage of them attain high energies. We perform classification, regression, and anomaly detection algorithms on the dataset by using a convolutional neural network, a multi-layer perceptron, and an autoencoder. Despite the noisy and imbalanced dataset, all methods demonstrate the capability to differentiate between thermal and accelerated electrons with remarkable accuracy. The proposed methodology may considerably simplify particle classification in large-scale PIC and hybrid simulations.

We devise and demonstrate a method to search for nongravitational couplings of ultralight dark matter to standard model particles using space-time separated atomic clocks and cavity-stabilized lasers. By making use of space-time separated sensors, which probe different values of an oscillating dark matter field, we can search for couplings that cancel in typical local experiments. This provides sensitivity to both the temporal and spatial fluctuations of the field. We demonstrate this method using existing data from a frequency comparison of lasers stabilized to two optical cavities connected via a 2220 km fiber link [Schioppo et al., Nat. Commun. 13, 212 (2022)NCAOBW2041-172310.1038/s41467-021-27884-3], and from the atomic clocks on board the global positioning system satellites. Our analysis results in constraints on the coupling of scalar dark matter to electrons, <inline-formula><mml:math display="inline"><mml:msub><mml:mi>d</mml:mi><mml:msub><mml:mi>m</mml:mi><mml:mi>e</mml:mi></mml:msub></mml:msub></mml:math></inline-formula>, for masses between <inline-formula><mml:math display="inline"><mml:mrow><mml:msup><mml:mrow><mml:mn>10</mml:mn></mml:mrow><mml:mrow><mml:mo>-</mml:mo><mml:mn>19</mml:mn></mml:mrow></mml:msup></mml:mrow></mml:math></inline-formula> and <inline-formula><mml:math display="inline"><mml:mrow><mml:mn>2</mml:mn><mml:mo>×</mml:mo><mml:msup><mml:mrow><mml:mn>10</mml:mn></mml:mrow><mml:mrow><mml:mo>-</mml:mo><mml:mn>15</mml:mn></mml:mrow></mml:msup><mml:mtext> </mml:mtext><mml:mtext> </mml:mtext><mml:mi>eV</mml:mi><mml:mo>/</mml:mo><mml:msup><mml:mrow><mml:mi>c</mml:mi></mml:mrow><mml:mrow><mml:mn>2</mml:mn></mml:mrow></mml:msup></mml:mrow></mml:math></inline-formula>. These are the first constraints on <inline-formula><mml:math display="inline"><mml:msub><mml:mi>d</mml:mi><mml:msub><mml:mi>m</mml:mi><mml:mi>e</mml:mi></mml:msub></mml:msub></mml:math></inline-formula> alone in this mass range.

Despite the three-dimensional nature of core-collapse supernovae (CCSNe), simulations in spherical symmetry (1D) play an important role to study large model sets for the progenitor-remnant connection, explosion properties, remnant masses, and CCSN nucleosynthesis. To trigger explosions in 1D, various numerical recipes have been applied, mostly with gross simplifications of the complex microphysics governing stellar core collapse, the formation of the compact remnant, and the mechanism of the explosion. Here we investigate the two most popular treatments, piston-driven and thermal-bomb explosions, in comparison to 1D explosions powered by a parametric neutrino engine in the P-HOTB code. For this comparison we calculate CCSNe for eight stars and evolution times up to 10,000 s, targeting the same progenitor-specific explosion energies as obtained by the neutrino-engine results. Otherwise we employ widely-used ("classic") modelling assumptions, and alternatively to the standard contraction-expansion trajectory for pistons, we also test suitably selected Lagrangian mass shells adopted from the neutrino-driven explosions as "special trajectories." Although the 56Ni production agrees within roughly a factor of two between the different explosion triggers, neither piston nor thermal bombs can reproduce the correlation of 56Ni yields and explosion energies found in neutrino-driven explosions. This shortcoming as well as the problem of massive fallback witnessed in classical piston models, which diminishes or extinguishes the ejected nickel, can be largely cured by the special trajectories. These and the choice of the explosion energies, however, make the modelling dependent on pre-existing neutrino-driven explosion results.

Planetary nebulae (PNe) and their luminosity function (PNLF) in galaxies have been used as a cosmic distance indicator for decades, yet a fundamental understanding is still lacking to explain the universality of the PNLF among different galaxies. Models for the PNLF have generally assumed solar metallicities and artificial stellar populations. In this work, we investigate how metallicity and helium abundances affect the PNe and PNLF, and the importance of the initial-to-final mass relation (IFMR), to resolve the tension between PNLF observations and models. We introduce PICS (PNe In Cosmological Simulations), a PN model framework that accounts for metallicity and is applicable to realistic stellar populations from cosmological simulations and observations. The framework combines stellar evolution models with post-AGB tracks and PN models to obtain PNe from a parent stellar population. We find that metallicity plays an important role for the resulting PNe: old metal-rich populations can harbor much brighter PNe than old metal-poor ones. We show that the helium abundance is a vital ingredient at high metallicities and explore the impact on the PNLF of a possible saturation of the helium content at higher metallicities. We present PNLF grids for different stellar ages and metallicities, where the observed PNLF bright end can be reached even for old stellar populations of 10 Gyr at high metallicities. Finally, we find that the PNLFs of old stellar populations are very sensitive to the IFMR, allowing for the production of bright PNe. With PICS, we have laid the groundwork for studying how different models affect the PNe and PNLF. Two central ingredients for this are the metallicity and helium abundance. Future applications of PICS include modeling PNe in a cosmological framework to explain the origin of the universal PNLF bright-end cutoff and use it as a diagnostic tool for galaxy formation.

Slow flavor evolution (defined as driven by neutrino masses and not necessarily ``slow'') is receiving fresh attention in the context of compact astrophysical environments. In Part~I of this series, we have studied the slow-mode dispersion relation following our recently developed analogy to plasma waves. The concept of resonance between flavor waves in the linear regime and propagating neutrinos is the defining feature of this approach. It is best motivated for weak instabilities, which probably is the most relevant regime in self-consistent astrophysical environments because these will try to eliminate the cause of instability. We here go beyond the dispersion relation alone (which by definition applies to infinite media) and consider the group velocities of unstable modes that determines whether the instability relaxes within the region where it first appears (absolute), or away from it (convective). We show that all weak instabilities are convective so that their further evolution is not local. Therefore, studying their consequences numerically in small boxes from given initial conditions may not always be appropriate.

We investigate the redshift evolution of the concentration-mass relationship of dark matter haloes in state-of-the-art cosmological hydrodynamic simulations and their dark-matter-only (DMO) counterparts. By combining the IllustrisTNG suite and the novel MillenniumTNG simulation, our analysis encompasses a wide range of box size (<inline-formula><tex-math id="TM0002" notation="LaTeX">$50{-}740 \: \rm cMpc$</tex-math></inline-formula>) and mass resolution (<inline-formula><tex-math id="TM0003" notation="LaTeX">$8.5 \times 10^4 {-} 3.1 \times 10^7 \: \rm {\rm M}_{\odot }$</tex-math></inline-formula> per baryonic mass element). This enables us to study the impact of baryons on the concentration-mass relationship in the redshift interval <inline-formula><tex-math id="TM0004" notation="LaTeX">$0\lt z\lt 7$</tex-math></inline-formula> over an unprecedented halo mass range, extending from dwarf galaxies to superclusters (<inline-formula><tex-math id="TM0005" notation="LaTeX">$\sim 10^{9.5}{-}10^{15.5} \, \rm {\rm M}_{\odot }$</tex-math></inline-formula>). We find that the presence of baryons increases the steepness of the concentration-mass relationship at higher redshift, and demonstrate that this is driven by adiabatic contraction of the profile, due to gas accretion at early times, which promotes star formation in the inner regions of haloes. At lower redshift, when the effects of feedback start to become important, baryons decrease the concentration of haloes below the mass scale <inline-formula><tex-math id="TM0006" notation="LaTeX">$\sim 10^{11.5} \, \rm {\rm M}_{\odot }$</tex-math></inline-formula>. Through a rigorous information criterion test, we show that broken power-law models accurately represent the redshift evolution of the concentration-mass relationship, and of the relative difference in the total mass of haloes induced by the presence of baryons. We provide the best-fitting parameters of our empirical formulae, enabling their application to models that mimic baryonic effects in DMO simulations over six decades in halo mass in the redshift range <inline-formula><tex-math id="TM0007" notation="LaTeX">$0\lt z\lt 7$</tex-math></inline-formula>.

In this paper, we explore the detectability of polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs) under diverse planetary conditions, aiming to identify promising targets for future observations of planetary atmospheres. Our primary goal is to determine the minimum detectable mass fractions of PAHs on each studied planet. We integrate the one-dimensional self-consistent model PETITCODE with PETITRADTRANS, a radiative transfer model, to simulate the transmission spectra of these planets. Subsequently, we employ the PANDEXO noise simulator using the NIRSpec PRISM instrument aboard the JWST to assess the observability. Then, we conduct a Bayesian analysis through the MULTINEST code. Our findings illustrate that variations in C/O ratios and planet temperatures significantly influence the transmission spectra and the detectability of PAHs. Our results show that planets with [Fe/H] = 0 and 1, C/O = 0.55, and temperatures around 1200 K are the most promising for detecting PAHs, with detectable mass fractions as low as 10<inline-formula><tex-math id="TM0001" notation="LaTeX">$^{-7}$</tex-math></inline-formula>, or one thousandth of the interstellar medium abundance level. For colder planets with lower metallicities and C/O ratios, as well as hotter planets with carbon-rich atmospheres, PAHs can be detected at abundances around 10<inline-formula><tex-math id="TM0002" notation="LaTeX">$^{-6}$</tex-math></inline-formula>. These results aid our strategy for selecting targets to study PAHs in the atmospheres of exoplanets.

Recent observations with JWST and the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array have revealed extremely massive quiescent galaxies at redshifts of z = 3 and higher, indicating both rapid onset and quenching of star formation. Using the cosmological simulation suite Magneticum Pathfinder, we reproduce the observed number densities and stellar masses, with 36 quenched galaxies of stellar mass larger than 3 × 10¹⁰ M _⊙ at z = 3.42. We find that these galaxies are quenched through a rapid burst of star formation and subsequent active galactic nucleus (AGN) feedback caused by a particularly isotropic collapse of surrounding gas, occurring on timescales of around 200 Myr or shorter. The resulting quenched galaxies host stellar components that are kinematically fast rotating and alpha-enhanced, while exhibiting a steeper metallicity and flatter age gradient compared to galaxies of similar stellar mass. The gas of the galaxies has been metal enriched and ejected. We find that quenched galaxies do not inhabit the densest nodes, but rather sit in local underdensities. We analyze observable metrics to predict future quenching at high redshifts, finding that on shorter timescales <500 Myr, the ratio M _bh/M _* is the best predictor, followed by the burstiness of the preceding star formation, t ₅₀–t ₉₀ (time to go from 50% to 90% stellar mass). On longer timescales, >1 Gyr, the environment becomes the strongest predictor, followed by t ₅₀–t ₉₀, indicating that at high redshifts the consumption of old gas and lack of new gas are more relevant for long-term prevention of star formation than the presence of a massive AGN. We predict that relics of such high-z quenched galaxies should best be characterized by a strong alpha enhancement.

We report the discovery and characterization of two sub-Saturns from the Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (\textit{TESS}) using high-resolution spectroscopic observations from the MaHPS spectrograph at the Wendelstein Observatory and the SOPHIE spectrograph at the Haute-Provence Observatory. Combining photometry from TESS, KeplerCam, LCOGT, and MuSCAT2 with the radial velocity measurements from MaHPS and SOPHIE we measure precise radii and masses for both planets. TOI-5108 b is a sub-Saturn with a radius of $6.6 \pm 0.1$ $R_\oplus$ and a mass of $32 \pm 5$ $M_\oplus$. TOI-5786 b is similar to Saturn with a radius of $8.54 \pm 0.13$ $R_\oplus$ and a mass of $73 \pm 9$ $M_\oplus$. The host star for TOI-5108 b is a moderately bright (Vmag 9.75) G-type star. TOI-5786 is a slightly dimmer (Vmag 10.2) F-type star. Both planets are close to their host stars with periods of 6.75 days and 12.78 days respectively. This puts TOI-5108 b just inside the bounds of the Neptune desert while TOI-5786 b is right above the upper edge. We estimate hydrogen-helium envelope mass fractions of $38 \%$ for TOI-5108 b and $74 \% $ for TOI-5786 b. However, using a model for the interior structure that includes tidal effects the envelope fraction of TOI-5108 b could be much lower ($\sim 20\,\%$) depending on the obliquity. We estimate mass-loss rates between 1.0 * $10^9$ g/s and 9.8 * $10^9$ g/s for TOI-5108 b and between 3.6 * $10^8$ g/s and 3.5 * $10^9$ g/s for TOI-5786 b. Given their masses, this means that both planets are stable against photoevaporation. We also detect a transit signal for a second planet candidate in the TESS data of TOI-5786 with a period of 6.998 days and a radius of $3.83 \pm 0.16$ $R_\oplus$. Using our RV data and photodynamical modeling, we are able to provide a 3-$\sigma$ upper limit of 26.5 $M_\oplus$ for the mass of the potential inner companion to TOI-5786 b.

Context. The typically large distances, extinction, and crowding of Galactic supermassive star clusters (stellar clusters more massive than 10⁴ M_⊙) have so far hampered the identification of their very low mass members, required to extend our understanding of star and planet formation, and early stellar evolution, to the extremely energetic star-forming environment typical of starbursts. This situation has now evolved thanks to the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), and its unmatched resolution and sensitivity in the infrared. Aims. In this paper, the third of the series of the Extended Westerlund 1 and 2 Open Clusters Survey (EWOCS), we present JWST/NIRCam and JWST/MIRI observations of the supermassive star cluster Westerlund 1. These observations are specifically designed to unveil the cluster members down to the brown dwarf mass regime, and to allow us to select and study the protoplane-tary disks in the cluster and to study the mutual feedback between the cluster members and the surrounding environment. Methods. Westerlund 1 was observed as part of JWST GO-1905 for 23.6 hours. The data have been reduced using the JWST calibration pipeline, together with specific tools necessary to remove artifacts, such as the 1 /f random noise in NIRCam images. Source identification and photometry were performed with DOLPHOT. Results. The MIRI images show a plethora of different features. Diffuse nebular emission is observed around the cluster, which is typically composed of myriads of droplet-like features pointing toward the cluster center or the group of massive stars surrounding the Wolf–Rayet star W72/A. A long pillar is also observed in the northwest. The MIRI images also show resolved shells and outflows surrounding the M-type supergiants W20, W26, W75, and W237, the sgB[e] star W9 and the yellow hypergiant W4. Some of these shells have been observed before at other wavelengths, but never with the level of detail provided by JWST. The color-magnitude diagrams built using the NIRCam photometry show a clear cluster sequence, which is marked in its upper part by the 1828 NIRCam stars with X-ray counterparts. NIRCam observations using the F115W filter have reached the 23.8 mag limit with 50% completeness (roughly corresponding to a 0.06 M0 brown dwarf).

Polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs) have been detected throughout the Universe where they play essential roles in the evolution of their environments. For example, they are believed to affect atmospheric loss rates of close-in planets and might contribute to the pre-biotic chemistry and emergence of life. Despite their importance, the study of PAHs in exoplanet atmospheres has been limited. We aim to evaluate the possibility of detecting PAHs on exoplanets considering future observations using JWST's Near-Infrared Spectrograph PRISM mode. The hot Saturn WASP-6 b shows properties that are consistent with a potential PAH presence and is thus used as a case study for this work. Here, we compare the likelihoods of various synthetic haze species and their combinations with the influence of PAHs on the transmission spectrum of WASP-6 b. This is possible by applying the atmospheric retrieval code PETITRADTRANS to a collection of data from previous observations. Subsequently, by exploring synthetic, single transit JWST spectra of this planet that include PAHs, we assess whether these molecules can be detected in the near future. Previous observations support the presence of cloud/haze species in the spectrum of WASP-6 b. While this may include PAHs, the current data do not confirm their existence unambiguously. Our research suggests that utilizing the JWST for future observations could lead to a notable advancement in the study of PAHs. Employing this telescope, we find that a PAH abundance of approximately 0.1 per cent of the interstellar medium value could be robustly detectable.

Infall of interstellar material is a potential non-planetary origin of pressure bumps in protoplanetary disks. While pressure bumps arising from other mechanisms have been numerically demonstrated to promote planet formation, the impact of infall-induced pressure bumps remains unexplored. We aim to investigate the potential for planetesimal formation in an infall-induced pressure bump, starting with sub-micrometer-sized dust grains, and to identify the conditions most conducive to triggering this process. We developed a numerical model that integrates axisymmetric infall, dust drift, and dust coagulation, along with planetesimal formation via streaming instability. Our parameter space includes gas viscosity, dust fragmentation velocity, initial disk mass, characteristic disk radius, infall rate and duration, as well as the location and width of the infall region. An infall-induced pressure bump can trap dust from both the infalling material and the outer disk, promoting dust growth. The locally enhanced dust-to-gas ratio triggers streaming instability, forming a planetesimal belt inside the central infall location until the pressure bump is smoothed out by viscous gas diffusion. Planetesimal formation is favored by a massive, narrow streamer infalling onto a low-viscosity, low-mass, and spatially extended disk containing dust with a high fragmentation velocity. This configuration enhances the outward drift speed of dust on the inner side of the pressure bump, while also ensuring the prolonged persistence of the pressure bump. Planetesimal formation can occur even if the infalling material consists solely of gas. A pressure bump induced by infall is a favorable site for dust growth and planetesimal formation, and this mechanism does not require a preexisting massive planet to create the bump.

Redshift-space distortions (RSD), caused by the peculiar velocities of galaxies, are a key modelling challenge in galaxy clustering analyses, limiting the scales from which cosmological information can be reliably extracted. Unlike dynamical or galaxy bias effects, RSD imprint features that are sensitive to non-linearities across all scales. Yet, no distinction between these effects is made by the state-of-the-art analytical approach - the effective field theory (EFT) - which applies the same perturbative expansion to each of them. This paper explores an alternative approach, where the non-perturbative nature of RSD is partially preserved, and compares its effectiveness against the EFT in analysing power spectrum and bispectrum multipoles from synthetic samples of luminous red galaxies, using the projected sensitivity of a Stage-IV galaxy survey. Our results demonstrate that this distinct treatment of RSD improves the robustness of model predictions for both statistics, extending the validity range of the EFT from approximately $0.2\,h\,\mathrm{Mpc}^{-1}$ to $0.35\,h\,\mathrm{Mpc}^{-1}$ for the one-loop power spectrum and from $0.1\,h\,\mathrm{Mpc}^{-1}$ to $0.14\,h\,\mathrm{Mpc}^{-1}$ for the tree-level bispectrum. This leads to a significant enhancement in the precision of cosmological parameter constraints, with uncertainties on the Hubble rate, matter density, and scalar amplitude of fluctuations reduced by $20$-$40\,\%$ for the power spectrum multipoles alone compared to the EFT, and by $25$-$50\,\%$ for joint analyses with the bispectrum. The RSD treatment proposed here may thus play a crucial role in maximising the scientific return of current and future galaxy surveys. To support this advancement, all models for the power spectrum and bispectrum used in this work are made available through an extended version of the Python package COMET.

We address the analytic computation of the two-loop scattering amplitudes for the production of two photons in parton-parton scattering, mediated by loops of heavy quarks. Due to the presence of integrals of elliptic type, both partonic channels have been previously computed using semi-numerical methods. In this paper, leveraging new advances in the theory of differential equations for elliptic Feynman integrals, we derive a canonical basis for all integrals involved and compute them in terms of independent iterated integrals over elliptic and polylogarithmic differential forms. We use this representation to showcase interesting cancellations in the physical expressions for the scattering amplitudes. Furthermore, we address their numerical evaluation by producing series expansion representations for the whole amplitudes, which we demonstrate to be fast and numerically reliable across a large region of the phase space.

For the spinning superparticle we construct the pull-back of the world-line path integral to super moduli space in the Hamiltonian formulation. We describe the underlying geometric decomposition of super moduli space. Algebraically, this gives a realization of the cyclic complex. The resulting space-time action is classically equivalent to Yang-Mills theory up to boundary terms and additional non-local interactions.

Context. General circulation models of gas giant exoplanets predict equatorial jets that drive inhomogeneities in the atmospheric physical parameters across the planetary surface. Aims. We studied the transmission spectrum of the hot Jupiter WASP-127 b during one transit in the K band with CRIRES⁺. Methods. Telluric and stellar signals were removed from the data using SYSREM and the planetary signal was investigated using the cross-correlation technique. After detecting a spectral signal indicative of atmospheric inhomogeneities, we employed a Bayesian retrieval framework with a two-dimensional modelling approach tailored to address this scenario. Results. We detected strong signals of H₂O and CO, which exhibited not one but two distinct cross-correlation peaks. The doublepeaked signal can be explained by a supersonic equatorial jet and muted signals at the planetary poles, with the two peaks representing the signals from the planet's morning and evening terminators. We calculated an equatorial jet velocity of 7.7 ± 0.2 km s^‑1 from our retrieved overall equatorial velocity and the planet's tidally locked rotation, and derive distinct atmospheric properties for the two terminators as well as the polar region. Our retrieval yields a solar C/O ratio and metallicity, and shows that the muted signals from the poles can be explained by either significantly lower temperatures or a high cloud deck. It provides tentative evidence for the morning terminator to be cooler than the evening terminator by ‑175_‑117⁺¹³³ K. Conclusions. Our detection of CO challenges previous non-detections of this species in WASP-127b's atmosphere. The presence of a clear double-peaked signal highlights the importance of taking planetary three-dimensional structure into account during interpretation of atmospheric signals. The measured supersonic jet velocity and the lack of signal from the polar regions, representing a detection of latitudinal inhomogeneity in a spatially unresolved target, showcases the power of high-resolution transmission spectroscopy for the characterisation of global circulation in exoplanet atmospheres.

We have observed the late Class I protostellar source Elias~29 at a spatial-resolution of 70~au with the Atacama~Large~Millimeter/submillimeter~Array (ALMA) as part of the FAUST Large Program. We focus on the line emission of SO, while that of $^{34}$SO, C$^{18}$O, CS, SiO, H$^{13}$CO$^{+}$, and DCO$^{+}$ are used supplementally. The spatial distribution of the SO rotational temperature ($T_{\rm rot}$(SO)) is evaluated by using the intensity ratio of its two rotational excitation lines. Besides in the vicinity of the protostar, two hot spots are found at a distance of 500 au from the protostar; $T_{\rm rot}$(SO) locally rises to 53$^{+25}_{-15}$~K at the interaction point of the outflow and the southern ridge, and 72$^{+66}_{-29}$~K within the southeastern outflow probably due to a jet-driven bow shock. However, the SiO emission is not detected at these hot spots. It is likely that active gas accretion through the disk-like structure and onto the protostar still continues even at this evolved protostellar stage, at least sporadically, considering the outflow/jet activities and the possible infall motion previously reported. Interestingly, $T_{\rm rot}$(SO) is as high as 20$-$30~K even within the quiescent part of the southern ridge apart from the protostar by 500$-$1000~au without clear kinematic indication of current outflow/jet interactions. Such a warm condition is also supported by the low deuterium fractionation ratio of HCO$^+$ estimated by using the H$^{13}$CO$^{+}$ and DCO$^{+}$ lines. The B-type star HD147889 $\sim$0.5 pc away from Elias~29, previously suggested as a heating source for this region, is likely responsible for the warm condition of Elias~29.

Numerous theories have postulated the existence of exotic spin-dependent interactions beyond the Standard Model of particle physics. Spin-based quantum sensors, which utilize the quantum properties of spins to enhance measurement precision, emerge as powerful tools for probing these exotic interactions. These sensors encompass a wide range of technologies, such as optically pumped magnetometers, atomic comagnetometers, spin masers, nuclear magnetic resonance, spin amplifiers, and nitrogen-vacancy centers. These technologies stand out for their ultrahigh sensitivity, compact tabletop design, and cost-effectiveness, offering complementary approaches to the large-scale particle colliders and astrophysical observations. This article reviews the underlying physical principles of various spin sensors and highlights the recent theoretical and experimental progress in the searches for exotic spin-dependent interactions with these quantum sensors. Investigations covered include the exotic interactions of spins with ultralight dark matter, exotic spin-dependent forces, electric dipole moment, spin-gravity interactions, and among others. Ongoing and forthcoming experiments using advanced spin-based sensors to investigate exotic spin-dependent interactions are discussed.

We performed a detailed spectroscopic analysis of three extremely metal-poor RR Lyrae stars, exploring uncharted territories at these low metallicities for this class of stars. Using high-resolution spectra acquired with HARPS-N at TNG, UVES at VLT, and PEPSI at LBT, and employing Non-Local Thermodynamic Equilibrium (NLTE) spectral synthesis calculations, we provide abundance measurements for Fe, Al, Mg, Ca, Ti, Mn, and Sr. Our findings indicate that the stars have metallicities of [Fe/H] = -3.40 \pm 0.05, -3.28 \pm 0.02, and -2.77 \pm 0.05 for HD 331986, DO Hya, and BPS CS 30317-056, respectively. Additionally, we derived their kinematic and dynamical properties to gain insights into their origins. Interestingly, the kinematics of one star (HD 331986) is consistent with the Galactic disc, while the others exhibit Galactic halo kinematics, albeit with distinct chemical signatures. We compared the [Al/Fe] and [Mg/Mn] ratios of the current targets with recent literature estimates to determine whether these stars were either accreted or formed in situ, finding that the adopted chemical diagnostics are ineffective at low metallicities ([Fe/H] $\lesssim -$1.5). Finally, the established horizontal branch evolutionary models, indicating that these stars arrive at hotter temperatures on the Zero-Age Horizontal Branch (ZAHB) and then transition into RR Lyrae stars as they evolve, fully support the existence of such low-metallicity RR Lyrae stars. As a consequence, we can anticipate detecting more of them when larger samples of spectra become available from upcoming extensive observational campaigns.

We investigate ultra slow-roll inflation with a seed black hole in a de Sitter background. By numerically tracking transitions from slow-roll to ultra slow-roll inflation, we find that quasi-normal mode solutions of the scalar field are excited following the decay of the slow-roll attractor, depending on the mass of the black hole. For small black holes, the picture is similar to standard inflation with the usual damping of the scalar field; with a large black hole, we find that the ringing modes dominate. It is believed that the transition to ultra slow-roll in the pure inflationary case enhances the peak of the primordial power spectrum, thereby increasing the likelihood of primordial black hole formation. We comment on how the novel ringing behaviour due to the seed black hole might impact on cosmological perturbations.

Our understanding of the $\gamma$-ray sky has improved dramatically in the past decade, however, the unresolved $\gamma$-ray background (UGRB) still has a potential wealth of information about the faintest $\gamma$-ray sources pervading the Universe. Statistical cross-correlations with tracers of cosmic structure can indirectly identify the populations that most characterize the $\gamma$-ray background. In this study, we analyze the angular correlation between the $\gamma$-ray background and the matter distribution in the Universe as traced by gravitational lensing, leveraging more than a decade of observations from the Fermi-Large Area Telescope (LAT) and 3 years of data from the Dark Energy Survey (DES). We detect a correlation at signal-to-noise ratio of 8.9. Most of the statistical significance comes from large scales, demonstrating, for the first time, that a substantial portion of the UGRB aligns with the mass clustering of the Universe as traced by weak lensing. Blazars provide a plausible explanation for this signal, especially if those contributing to the correlation reside in halos of large mass ($\sim 10^{14} M_{\odot}$) and account for approximately 30-40 % of the UGRB above 10 GeV. Additionally, we observe a preference for a curved $\gamma$-ray energy spectrum, with a log-parabolic shape being favored over a power-law. We also discuss the possibility of modifications to the blazar model and the inclusion of additional $gamma$-ray sources, such as star-forming galaxies or particle dark matter.

Context. Massive stars are one of the most important and investigated astrophysical production sites of ²⁶Al, a short-lived radioisotope with an ~1 Myr half-life. Its short lifetime prevents us from observing its complete chemical history, and only the ²⁶Al that was recently produced by massive stars can be observed. Hence, it is considered a tracer of star formation rate (SFR). However, important contributions to ²⁶Al come from nova systems that pollute the interstellar medium with a large delay, thus partly erasing the correlation between ²⁶Al and SFR. Aims. In this work, we aim to describe the 2D distribution of the mass of ²⁶Al as well as that of massive stars and nova systems in the Milky Way (MW), to investigate their relative contributions to the production of ²⁶Al. Methods. We used a detailed 2D chemical evolution model where the SFR is azimuthally dependent and is required to reproduce the spiral arm pattern observed in the MW. We tested two different models, one where the ²⁶Al comes from massive stars and novae, and one with massive stars only. We then compared the predictions to the ~2 M_⊙ of ²⁶Al mass observed by the surveys of the Compton Telescope (COMPTEL) and International Gamma-Ray Laboratory (INTEGRAI). Results. The results show that novae do not trace SFR and, in the solar vicinity, they concentrate in its minima. The effect of novae on the map of the ²⁶Al mass consists in damping the spiral pattern by a factor of five. Regarding the nucleosynthesis, we find that ~75% of the ²⁶Al is produced by novae and the ~25% by massive stars. Conclusions. We conclude that novae cannot be neglected as ²⁶Al producers since the observations can only be reproduced by including their contribution. Moreover, we suggest that bulge novae should eject around six times more material than the disc ones to well reproduce the observed mass of ²⁶Al.

Testing gravity and the concordance model of cosmology, <inline-formula><tex-math id="TM0002" notation="LaTeX">$\Lambda$</tex-math></inline-formula>CDM, at large scales is a key goal of this decade's largest galaxy surveys. Here we present a comparative study of dark matter power spectrum predictions from different numerical codes in the context of three popular theories of gravity that induce scale-independent modifications to the linear growth of structure: nDGP, Cubic Galileon, and K-mouflage. In particular, we compare the predictions from N-body simulations solving the full scalar field equation, two N-body codes with approximate time integration schemes, a parametrized modified N-body implementation, and the analytic halo model reaction approach. We find the modification to the <inline-formula><tex-math id="TM0006" notation="LaTeX">$\Lambda$</tex-math></inline-formula>CDM spectrum is in 2 per cent agreement at <inline-formula><tex-math id="TM0007" notation="LaTeX">$z\le 1$</tex-math></inline-formula> and <inline-formula><tex-math id="TM0008" notation="LaTeX">$k\le 1~h\,{\rm Mpc}^{-1}$</tex-math></inline-formula> over all gravitational models and codes, in accordance with many previous studies, indicating these modelling approaches are robust enough to be used in forthcoming survey analyses under appropriate scale cuts. We further make public the new code implementations presented, specifically the halo model reaction K-mouflage implementation and the relativistic Cubic Galileon implementation.

We investigate how the strength of the Lorentz force alters stellar convection zone dynamics in a suite of buoyancy-dominated, three-dimensional, spherical shell convective dynamo models. This is done by varying only the magnetic Prandtl number, $Pm$, the non-dimensional form of the fluid's electrical conductivity $\sigma$. Because the strength of the dynamo magnetic field and the Lorentz force scale with $Pm$, it is found that the fluid motions, the pattern of convective heat transfer, and the mode of dynamo generation all differ across the $0.25 \leq Pm \leq 10$ range investigated here. For example, we show that strong magnetohydrodynamic effects cause a fundamental change in the surface zonal flows: differential rotation switches from solar-like (prograde equatorial zonal flow) for larger electrical conductivities to an anti-solar differential rotation (retrograde equatorial zonal flow) at lower electrical conductivities. This study shows that the value of the bulk electrical conductivity is important not only for sustaining dynamo action, but can also drive first-order changes in the characteristics of the magnetic, velocity, and temperature fields. It is also associated with the relative strength of the Lorentz force in the system as measured by the local magnetic Rossby number, $Ro_\ell^M$, which we show is crucial in setting the characteristics of the large-scale convection regime that generates those dynamo fields.

Feynman integrals are very often computed from their differential equations. It is not uncommon that the $\varepsilon$-factorised differential equation contains only dlog-forms with algebraic arguments, where the algebraic part is given by (multiple) square roots. It is well-known that if all square roots are simultaneously rationalisable, the Feynman integrals can be expressed in terms of multiple polylogarithms. This is a sufficient, but not a necessary criterium. In this paper we investigate weaker requirements. We discuss under which conditions we may use different rationalisations in different parts of the calculation. In particular we show that we may use different rationalisations if they correspond to different parameterisations of the same integration path. We present a non-trivial example -- the one-loop pentagon function with three adjacent massive external legs involving seven square roots -- where this technique can be used to express the result in terms of multiple polylogarithms.

The planar three-gluon form factor for the chiral stress tensor operator in planar maximally supersymmetric Yang-Mills theory is an analog of the Higgs-to-three-gluon scattering amplitude in QCD. The amplitude (symbol) bootstrap program has provided a wealth of high-loop perturbative data about this form factor, with results up to eight loops available. The symbol of the form factor at $L$ loops is given by words of length $2L$ in six letters with associated integer coefficients. In this paper, we analyze this data, describing patterns of zero coefficients and relations between coefficients. We find many sequences of words whose coefficients are given by closed-form expressions which we expect to be valid at any loop order. Moreover, motivated by our previous machine-learning analysis, we identify simple recursion relations that relate the coefficient of a word to the coefficients of particular lower-loop words. These results open an exciting door for understanding scattering amplitudes at all loop orders.

Context. The extreme temperature gradients from day- to nightside in the atmospheres of hot Jupiters generate fast winds in the form of equatorial jets or day-to-night flows. Observations of blue-shifted and red-shifted signals in the transmission and dayside spectra of WASP-189 b have sparked discussions about the nature of winds on this planet. Aims. To investigate the structure of winds in the atmosphere of the ultra-hot Jupiter WASP-189 b, we studied its dayside emission spectrum with CRIRES⁺ in the spectral K band. Methods. After removing stellar and telluric lines, we used the cross-correlation method to search for a range of molecules and detected emission signals of CO and Fe. Subsequently, we employed a Bayesian framework to retrieve the atmospheric parameters relating to the temperature–pressure structure and chemistry, and incorporated a numerical model of the line profile influenced by various dynamic effects to determine the wind structure. Results. The cross-correlation signals of CO and Fe showed a velocity offset of ~6 km s^‑1, which could be caused by a fast day-tonight wind in the atmosphere of WASP-189 b. The atmospheric retrieval showed that the line profile of the observed spectra is best fitted by the presence of a day-to-night wind of 4.4_‑2.2^+1.8 km s^‑1, while the retrieved equatorial jet velocity of 1.0_‑1.8^+0.9 km s^‑1 is consistent with the absence of such a jet. Such a wind pattern is consistent with the observed line broadening and can explain the majority of the velocity offset, while uncertainties in the ephemerides and the effects of a hot spot could also contribute to this offset. We further retrieved an inverted temperature-pressure profile, and under the assumption of equilibrium chemistry we retrieved a C/O ratio of 0.32_‑0.14^+0.41 and a metallicity of M/H = 1.40_‑0.60^+1.39. Conclusions. We showed that red-shifts of a few km s^‑1 in the dayside spectra could be explained by day-to-night winds. Further studies combining transmission and dayside observations could advance our understanding of WASP-189 b's atmospheric circulation by improving the uncertainties in the velocity offset and wind parameters.

The 1-point matter density probability distribution function (PDF) captures some of the non-Gaussian information lost in standard 2-point statistics. The matter PDF can be well predicted at mildly non-linear scales using large deviations theory. This work extends those predictions to biased tracers like dark matter halos and the galaxies they host. We model the conditional PDF of tracer counts given matter density using a tracer bias and stochasticity model previously used for photometric data. We find accurate parametrisations for tracer bias with a smoothing scale-independent 2-parameter Gaussian Lagrangian bias model and a quadratic shot noise. We relate those bias and stochasticity parameters to the one for the power spectrum and tracer-matter covariances. We validate the model against the Quijote suite of N-body simulations and find excellent agreement for both halo and galaxy density PDFs and their cosmology dependence. We demonstrate the constraining power of the tracer PDFs and their complementarity to power spectra through a Fisher forecast. We focus on the cosmological parameters σ8 and Ωm as well as linear bias parameters, finding that the strength of the tracer PDF lies in disentangling tracer bias from cosmology. Our results show promise for applications to spectroscopic clustering data when augmented with a redshift space distortion model

Context. The amount of turbulent pressure in galaxy clusters is still debated, especially in relation to the impact of the dynamical state and the hydro-method used for simulations. Aims. We study the turbulent pressure fraction in the intracluster medium of massive galaxy clusters. We aim to understand the impact of the hydrodynamical scheme, analysis method, and dynamical state on the final properties of galaxy clusters from cosmological simulations. Methods. We performed non-radiative simulations of a set of zoom-in regions of seven galaxy clusters with meshless finite mass (MFM) and smoothed particle hydrodynamics (SPH). We used three different analysis methods based on: (i) the deviation from hydrostatic equilibrium, (ii) the solenoidal velocity component obtained by a Helmholtz-Hodge decomposition, and (iii) the small-scale velocity obtained through a multi-scale filtering approach. We split the sample of simulated clusters into active and relaxed clusters. Results. Our simulations predict an increased turbulent pressure fraction for active clusters compared to relaxed ones. This is especially visible for the velocity-based methods. For these, we also find increased turbulence for the MFM simulations compared to SPH, consistent with findings from more idealized simulations. The predicted nonthermal pressure fraction varies between a few percent for relaxed clusters and ≈13% for active ones within the cluster center and increases toward the outskirts. No clear trend with redshift is visible. Conclusions. Our analysis quantitatively assesses the importance played by the hydrodynamical scheme and the analysis method to determine the nonthermal or turbulent pressure fraction. While our setup is relatively simple (non-radiative runs), our simulations show agreement with previous, more idealized simulations, and represent a step closer to an understanding of turbulence.

Relativistic pair beams produced in the intergalactic medium by TeV gamma rays from blazars are expected to generate a detectable GeV-scale electromagnetic cascade, yet this cascade is absent in the observed spectra of hard-spectrum TeV emitting blazars. This suppression is often attributed to weak intergalactic magnetic fields (IGMF) deflecting electron-positron pairs out of the line of sight. Alternatively, it has been proposed that beam-plasma instabilities could drain the energy of the beam before they produce the secondary cascades. Recent studies suggest that the modification of beam distribution due to these instabilities is primarily driven by particle scattering, rather than energy loss. In this paper, we quantitatively assess, for the blazar 1ES 0229+200, the arrival time of secondary gamma rays at Earth from the beam scattering by the electrostatic instability. We first computed the production rates of electron-positron pairs at various distances using the Monte Carlo simulation CRPropa. We then simulated the feedback of the plasma instability on the beam, incorporating production rates and inverse Compton cooling, to determine the steady-state distribution function. Our findings reveal that the time delay of the GeV secondary cascade arrival due to instability broadening is on the order of a few months. This delay is insufficient to account for the missing cascade emission in blazar spectra, suggesting that plasma instabilities do not significantly affect IGMF constraints.

The detection of primordial B modes of the cosmic microwave background (CMB) could provide information about the early stages of the Universe's evolution. The faintness of this signal requires exquisite calibration accuracy and control of instrumental systematic effects which otherwise could bias the measurements. In this work, we study the impact of an imperfect relative polarisation gain calibration on the recovered value of the tensor-to-scalar ratio r for the LiteBIRD experiment, through the application of the blind Needlet Internal Linear Combination (NILC) foreground-cleaning method. We derive requirements on the relative calibration accuracy of the overall polarisation gain (Δg_ν ) for each LiteBIRD frequency channel. Our results show that minimum variance techniques, as NILC, are less sensitive to systematic gain calibration uncertainties compared to a parametric approach, if the latter is not equipped with a proper modelling of these instrumental effects. In this study, the most stringent requirements are found in the channels where the CMB signal is relatively brighter, with the tightest constraints at 166 GHz (Δg_ν ≈ 0.16%). This differs from the outcome of an analogous analysis performed with a parametric method, where the tightest requirements are obtained for the foreground-dominated channels. Gain calibration uncertainties, corresponding to the derived requirements, are then simultaneously propagated into all frequency channels. By doing so, we find that the overall impact on estimated r is lower than the total gain systematic budget for LiteBIRD approximately by a factor 5, due to the correlations of the impacts of gain calibration uncertainties in different frequency channels. In order to decouple the systematic effect from the specific choice of the model, we derive the requirements assuming constant spectral parameters for the foreground emission. To assess the robustness of the obtained results against more realistic scenarios, we repeat the analysis assuming sky models of intermediate and high complexity. In these further cases, we adopt an optimised NILC pipeline, called the Multi-Clustering NILC (MC-NILC). We find that the impact of gain calibration uncertainties on r is lower than the LiteBIRD gain systematics budget for the intermediate-complexity sky model. For the high-complexity case, instead, it would be necessary to tighten the requirements by a factor 1.8.

Within the framework of nonrelativistic QCD (NRQCD) effective field theory, we study the leptoproduction of <inline-formula><mml:math display="inline"><mml:mi>J</mml:mi><mml:mo>/</mml:mo><mml:mi>ψ</mml:mi></mml:math></inline-formula> at next-to-leading order in perturbative QCD for both unpolarized and polarized electron-ion collisions. We demonstrate that the <inline-formula><mml:math display="inline"><mml:mi>J</mml:mi><mml:mo>/</mml:mo><mml:mi>ψ</mml:mi></mml:math></inline-formula>-tagged deep inelastic scattering in the future Electron-Ion Collider can be served as a golden channel for reasons including constraining NRQCD long-distance matrix elements, probing the nuclear gluon distribution functions, as well as investigating the gluon helicity distribution inside a longitudinal polarized proton.

We study the compatibility between the <inline-formula><mml:math display="inline"><mml:msup><mml:mi>K</mml:mi><mml:mo>-</mml:mo></mml:msup><mml:mi mathvariant="normal">Λ</mml:mi></mml:math></inline-formula> correlation function, recently measured by the ALICE collaboration, and the LHCb <inline-formula><mml:math display="inline"><mml:msup><mml:mi>K</mml:mi><mml:mo>-</mml:mo></mml:msup><mml:mi mathvariant="normal">Λ</mml:mi></mml:math></inline-formula> invariant mass distribution obtained in the <inline-formula><mml:math display="inline"><mml:msubsup><mml:mi mathvariant="normal">Ξ</mml:mi><mml:mi>b</mml:mi><mml:mo>-</mml:mo></mml:msubsup><mml:mo stretchy="false">→</mml:mo><mml:mi>J</mml:mi><mml:mo>/</mml:mo><mml:mi>ψ</mml:mi><mml:mi mathvariant="normal">Λ</mml:mi><mml:msup><mml:mi>K</mml:mi><mml:mo>-</mml:mo></mml:msup></mml:math></inline-formula> decay. The <inline-formula><mml:math display="inline"><mml:msup><mml:mi>K</mml:mi><mml:mo>-</mml:mo></mml:msup><mml:mi mathvariant="normal">Λ</mml:mi></mml:math></inline-formula> invariant mass distribution associated with the <inline-formula><mml:math display="inline"><mml:msubsup><mml:mi mathvariant="normal">Ξ</mml:mi><mml:mi>b</mml:mi><mml:mo>-</mml:mo></mml:msubsup></mml:math></inline-formula> decay has been calculated within the framework of unitary effective field theories using two models, one of them constrained by the <inline-formula><mml:math display="inline"><mml:msup><mml:mi>K</mml:mi><mml:mo>-</mml:mo></mml:msup><mml:mi mathvariant="normal">Λ</mml:mi></mml:math></inline-formula> correlation function. We consider two degenerate pentaquark <inline-formula><mml:math display="inline"><mml:msub><mml:mi>P</mml:mi><mml:mrow><mml:mi>c</mml:mi><mml:mi>s</mml:mi></mml:mrow></mml:msub></mml:math></inline-formula> states in the <inline-formula><mml:math display="inline"><mml:mi>J</mml:mi><mml:mo>/</mml:mo><mml:mi>ψ</mml:mi><mml:mi mathvariant="normal">Λ</mml:mi></mml:math></inline-formula> scattering amplitude which allows us to investigate their impact on both the <inline-formula><mml:math display="inline"><mml:msup><mml:mi>K</mml:mi><mml:mo>-</mml:mo></mml:msup><mml:mi mathvariant="normal">Λ</mml:mi></mml:math></inline-formula> and <inline-formula><mml:math display="inline"><mml:mi>J</mml:mi><mml:mo>/</mml:mo><mml:mi>ψ</mml:mi><mml:mi mathvariant="normal">Λ</mml:mi></mml:math></inline-formula> mass distributions assuming different spin-parity quantum numbers and multiplicity. Without any fitting procedure, the <inline-formula><mml:math display="inline"><mml:msup><mml:mi>K</mml:mi><mml:mo>-</mml:mo></mml:msup><mml:mi mathvariant="normal">Λ</mml:mi></mml:math></inline-formula> model is able to better reproduce the experimental <inline-formula><mml:math display="inline"><mml:msup><mml:mi>K</mml:mi><mml:mo>-</mml:mo></mml:msup><mml:mi mathvariant="normal">Λ</mml:mi></mml:math></inline-formula> mass spectrum in the energy region above 1680 MeV as compared to previous unitarized scattering amplitudes constrained to a large amount of experimental data in the neutral <inline-formula><mml:math display="inline"><mml:mi>S</mml:mi><mml:mo>=</mml:mo><mml:mo>-</mml:mo><mml:mn>1</mml:mn></mml:math></inline-formula> meson-baryon sector. We observe a tension between our model and the LHCb <inline-formula><mml:math display="inline"><mml:msup><mml:mi>K</mml:mi><mml:mo>-</mml:mo></mml:msup><mml:mi mathvariant="normal">Λ</mml:mi></mml:math></inline-formula> distribution in the region close to threshold, largely dominated by the presence of the still poorly known <inline-formula><mml:math display="inline"><mml:mi mathvariant="normal">Ξ</mml:mi><mml:mrow><mml:mo stretchy="false">(</mml:mo><mml:mn>1620</mml:mn><mml:mo stretchy="false">)</mml:mo></mml:mrow></mml:math></inline-formula> state. We discuss in detail the different production mechanisms probed via femtoscopy and spectroscopy that could provide valid explanations for such disagreement, indicating the necessity to employ future correlation data in other <inline-formula><mml:math display="inline"><mml:mi>S</mml:mi><mml:mo>=</mml:mo><mml:mo>-</mml:mo><mml:mn>2</mml:mn></mml:math></inline-formula> channels such as <inline-formula><mml:math display="inline"><mml:mi>π</mml:mi><mml:mi mathvariant="normal">Ξ</mml:mi></mml:math></inline-formula> and <inline-formula><mml:math display="inline"><mml:mover accent="true"><mml:mi>K</mml:mi><mml:mo stretchy="false">¯</mml:mo></mml:mover><mml:mi mathvariant="normal">Σ</mml:mi></mml:math></inline-formula>.

Astrophysical uncertainties in dark matter direct detection experiments are typically addressed by parametrizing the velocity distribution in terms of a few uncertain parameters that vary around some central values. Here we propose a method to optimize over all velocity distributions lying within a given distance measure from a central distribution. We discretize the dark matter velocity distribution as a superposition of streams and use a variety of information divergences to parametrize its uncertainties. With this, we bracket the limits on the dark matter–nucleon and dark matter–electron scattering cross sections, when the true dark matter velocity distribution deviates from the commonly assumed Maxwell-Boltzmann form. The methodology pursued is general and could be applied to other physics scenarios where a given physical observable depends on a function that is uncertain.

We derive the full system of canonical differential equations for all planar two-loop massless six-particle master integrals, and determine analytically the boundary conditions. This fully specifies the solutions, which may be written as Chen iterated integrals. We argue that this is sufficient information for evaluating any scattering amplitude in four dimensions up to the finite part. We support this claim by reducing, for the most complicated integral topologies, integrals with typical Yang-Mills numerators. We use the analytic solutions to the differential equations, together with dihedral symmetry, to provide the full solution space relevant for two-loop six-particle computations. This includes the relevant function alphabet, as well as the independent set of iterated integrals up to weight four. We also provide the answer for all master integrals in terms of iterated integrals that can be readily evaluated numerically. As a proof of concept, we provide a numerical implementation that evaluates the integrals in part of the Euclidean region, and validate this against numerical evaluation of the Feynman integrals. Our result removes the bottleneck of Feynman integral evaluation, paving the way to future analytic evaluations of six-particle scattering amplitudes.

RNA is an information-carrying molecule that instructs protein synthesis, but it also functions as a catalyst in so-called ribozymes. Here, we study this multifunctional character using a dynamic combinatorial library powered by chemical fuel. On the one hand, we demonstrate that RNA templates the oligomerization and inhibits deoligomerization. On the other hand, we show that RNA can be a structural element in the formation of hydrogels. Moreover, in its hydrogel, RNA degradation by nucleases is accelerated. Thus, templates have a role beyond blueprints, protectors, and selectors. Template-oligomer interactions can create new (micro)environments that might affect evolutionary dynamics.

Biological machines, such as the archaeal flagellar rotational motor, are powered by the catalytic conversion of high-energy chemicals, e.g., ATP, to perform work on the micrometer scale. Synthetic counterparts that spin and exert forces at the expense of chemical energy and operate over multiple length scales do not exist but are sought after to advance the field of nanotechnologies. Such systems would be powerful for cargo transport, pumping or mixing fluids, sensing environments, and biomaterials.

Here, we demonstrate a new mechanism by which a nanometer-sized chemical fuel powers micron-sized supramolecular nanoribbons’ directional rotation, contraction, and motion. The nanoribbons exert pN forces on their surroundings, comparable to biological machines. Although mechanistically very different than the archaeal flagellum, the forces these ribbons generate make assemblies of nanoribbons crawl on a glass surface, opening the door to micro- and nanoscale autonomous machines.

We study the infrared structure of the Standard Model (SM) restricted to the first generation of fermions, including the full SM gauge group, up to three-loop order, and determine the resulting cusp and collinear anomalous dimensions for all gauge groups and particles of the theory. We observe that starting from three loops, the resulting cusp anomalous dimensions include terms involving two distinct couplings, contrary to previous claims in the literature. We give a detailed explanation of this observation and explore the origin of these terms. We provide a supplementary file where all infrared anomalous dimensions calculated in this work are collected github.com/michael-stadlbauer/AnomalousDimensions.git. Our results are consistent with the existing literature wherever comparisons are possible.

We address how the interplay between the finite availability and carrying capacity of particles at different parts of a spatially extended system can control the steady-state currents and density profiles in the one-dimensional current-carrying lanes connecting the different parts of the system. To study this, we set up a minimal model consisting of two particle reservoirs of the same finite carrying capacity connected by two equally sized antiparallel totally asymmetric simple exclusion processes (TASEPs). We focus on the steady-state currents and particle density profiles in the two TASEP lanes. The ensuing phases and the phase diagrams, which can be remarkably complex, are parametrized by the model parameters defining particle exchange between the TASEP lanes and the reservoirs and the filling fraction of the particles that determine the total resources available. These parameters may be tuned to make the densities of the two TASEP lanes globally uniform or piece-wise continuous in the form of a combination of a single localized domain wall and a spatially constant density or a pair of delocalized domain walls. Our model reveals that the two reservoirs can be preferentially populated or depopulated in the steady states.

A recent evaluation of three-loop nonplanar Feynman integrals contributing to Higgs plus jet production has established their dependence on two novel symbol letters. We show that the resulting alphabet is described by a G₂ cluster algebra, enlarging the C₂ cluster algebra found to cover all previously known integrals relevant for this process. The cluster algebra connection we find reveals new adjacency relations, which significantly reduce the function space dimension of the non-planar triple ladder integral. These adjacencies may be understood in part by embedding G₂ inside higher-rank cluster algebras.

In a classical scattering problem, the classical eikonal is defined as the generator of the canonical transformation that maps in-states to out-states. It can be regarded as the classical limit of the log of the quantum S-matrix. In a classical analog of the Born approximation in quantum mechanics, the classical eikonal admits an expansion in oriented tree graphs, where oriented edges denote retarded/advanced worldline propagators. The Magnus expansion, which takes the log of a time-ordered exponential integral, offers an efficient method to compute the coefficients of the tree graphs to all orders. We exploit a Hopf algebra structure behind the Magnus expansion to develop a fast algorithm which can compute the tree coefficients up to the 12th order (over half a million trees) in less than an hour. In a relativistic setting, our methods can be applied to the post-Minkowskian (PM) expansion for gravitational binaries in the worldline formalism. We demonstrate the methods by computing the 3PM eikonal and find agreement with previous results based on amplitude methods. Importantly, the Magnus expansion yields a finite eikonal, while the naïve eikonal based on the time-symmetric propagator is infrared-divergent from 3PM on.

We performed a systematic search for strong gravitational lenses using Hyper Suprime-Cam (HSC) imaging data, focusing on galaxy-scale lenses combined with an environment analysis resulting in the identification of lensing clusters. To identify these lens candidates, we exploited our residual neural network from HOLISMOKES VI (Cañameras et al. 2021, A&A, 653, L6), trained on realistic gri mock-images as positive examples, and real HSC images as negative examples. Compared to our previous work, where we successfully applied the classifier to around 62.5 million galaxies having an i-Kron radius of ≥0.8″, we now lowered the i-Kron radius limit to ≥0.5″. The result in an increase by around 73 million sources, amounting to a total of over 135 million images. During our visual multi-stage grading of the network candidates, we also simultaneously inspected larger stamps (80″ × 80″) to identify large, extended arcs cropped in the 10″ × 10″ cutouts and also classify their overall environment. Here, we also re-inspected our previous lens candidates with i-Kron radii of ≥0.8″ and classified their environment. Using the 546 visually identified lens candidates, we further defined various criteria by exploiting extensive and complementary photometric redshift catalogs to select the candidates in overdensities. In total, we identified 24 grade A and 138 grade B exhibit either spatially-resolved multiple images or extended, distorted arcs in the new sample. Furthermore, combining our different techniques to determine overdensities, we identified a total 231/546 lens candidates by at least one of our three identification methods for overdensities. This new sample contains only 49 group- or cluster-scale re-discoveries, while 43 systems had been identified by all three procedures. Furthermore, we performed a statistical analysis by using the neural network from HOLISMOKES IX (Schuldt et al. 2023a, A&A, 671, A147) to model these systems as singular isothermal ellipsoids with external shear and to estimate their parameter values, making this the largest uniformly modeled sample to date. We find a tendency towards larger Einstein radii for galaxy-scale systems in overdense environments, while the other parameter values as well as the uncertainty distributions are consistent between those in overdense and non-overdense environments. These results demonstrate the feasibility of downloading and applying neural network classifiers to hundreds of million cutouts, which will be needed in the upcoming era of big data from deep, wide-field imaging surveys such as Euclid and the Rubin Observatory Legacy Survey of Space and Time. At the same time, it offers a sample size that can be visually inspected by humans. These deep learning pipelines, with false-positive rates of ∼0.01%, are very powerful tools to identify such rare galaxy-scale strong lensing systems, while also aiding in the discovery of new strong lensing clusters.

The Hubble tension is one of the most relevant unsolved problems in cosmology today. Strongly gravitationally lensed transient objects, such as strongly lensed supernovae, are an independent and competitive probe that can be used to determine the Hubble constant. In this context, the time delay between different images of lensed supernovae is a key ingredient. We present a method to retrieve time delays and the amount of differential dust extinction between multiple images of lensed type IIP supernovae (SNe IIP) through their color curves, which display a kink in the time evolution. With several realistic mock color curves based on an observed SN (not strongly lensed) from the Carnegie Supernova Project (CSP), our results show that we can determine the time delay with an uncertainty of approximately ± 1.0 days. This is achievable with light curves with a 2-day time interval and up to 35% missing data due to weather-related losses. Accounting for additional factors such as microlensing, seeing, shot noise from the host and lens galaxies, and blending of the SN images would likely increase the estimated uncertainties. Differentiated dust extinction is more susceptible to uncertainties because it depends on imposing the correct extinction law. Further, we also investigate the kink structure in the color curves for different rest-frame wavelength bands, particularly rest-frame ultraviolet (UV) light curves from the Neil Gehrels Swift Observatory (SWIFT), finding sufficiently strong kinks for our method to work for typical lensed SN redshifts that would redshift the kink feature to optical wavelengths. With the upcoming Rubin Observatory Legacy Survey of Space and Time (LSST), hundreds of strongly lensed supernovae will be detected, and our new method for lensed SN IIP is readily applicable to provide delays.

Jet observables at hadron colliders feature "super-leading" logarithms, double-logarithmic corrections resulting from a breakdown of color coherence due to complex phases in hard-scattering amplitudes. While these effects only arise in high orders of perturbation theory and are suppressed in the large-N_c limit, they formally constitute leading logarithmic corrections to the cross sections. We present the first analysis of the corresponding contributions to a hadronic cross section, including all partonic channels and interference effects. Interestingly, some interference terms in partonic <inline-formula id="IEq1"><mml:math display="inline" id="IEq1_Math"><mml:mi>q</mml:mi><mml:mover accent="true"><mml:mi>q</mml:mi><mml:mo stretchy="true">¯</mml:mo></mml:mover></mml:math></inline-formula> → <inline-formula id="IEq2"><mml:math display="inline" id="IEq2_Math"><mml:mi>q</mml:mi><mml:mover accent="true"><mml:mi>q</mml:mi><mml:mo stretchy="true">¯</mml:mo></mml:mover></mml:math></inline-formula> scattering are only linearly suppressed in 1/N_c. Our results for the pp → 2 jets gap-between-jets cross section demonstrate the numerical importance of super-leading logarithms for small values of the veto scale Q₀, showing that these contributions should be accounted for in precision studies of such observables.

Star-galaxy separation is a crucial step in creating target catalogues for extragalactic spectroscopic surveys. A classifier biased towards inclusivity risks including high numbers of stars, wasting fibre hours, while a more conservative classifier might overlook galaxies, compromising completeness and hence survey objectives. To avoid bias introduced by a training set in supervised methods, we employ an unsupervised machine learning approach. Using photometry from the Wide Area VISTA Extragalactic Survey (WAVES)-Wide catalogue comprising nine-band <inline-formula><tex-math id="TM0001" notation="LaTeX">$u - K_s$</tex-math></inline-formula> data, we create a feature space with colours, fluxes, and apparent size information extracted by PROFOUND. We apply the non-linear dimensionality reduction method UMAP (Uniform Manifold Approximation and Projection) combined with the classifier HDBSCAN (Hierarchical Density-Based Spatial Clustering of Applications with Noise) to classify stars and galaxies. Our method is verified against a baseline colour and morphological method using a truth catalogue from Gaia, SDSS (Sloan Digital Sky Survey), GAMA (Galaxy And Mass Assembly), and DESI (Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument). We correctly identify 99.75 per cent of galaxies within the AB magnitude limit of <inline-formula><tex-math id="TM0002" notation="LaTeX">$Z=21.2$</tex-math></inline-formula>, with an F1 score of <inline-formula><tex-math id="TM0003" notation="LaTeX">$0.9971 \pm 0.0018$</tex-math></inline-formula> across the entire ground truth sample, compared to <inline-formula><tex-math id="TM0004" notation="LaTeX">$0.9879 \pm 0.0088$</tex-math></inline-formula> from the baseline method. Our method's higher purity (<inline-formula><tex-math id="TM0005" notation="LaTeX">$0.9967 \pm 0.0021$</tex-math></inline-formula>) compared to the baseline (<inline-formula><tex-math id="TM0006" notation="LaTeX">$0.9795 \pm 0.0172$</tex-math></inline-formula>) increases efficiency, identifying 11 per cent fewer galaxy or ambiguous sources, saving approximately 70 000 fibre hours on the 4MOST (4-m Multi-Object Spectroscopic Telescope) instrument. We achieve reliable classification statistics for challenging sources including quasars, compact galaxies, and low surface brightness galaxies, retrieving 92.7 per cent, 84.6 per cent, and 99.5 per cent of them, respectively. Angular clustering analysis validates our classifications, showing consistency with expected galaxy clustering, regardless of the baseline classification.

Aims. We introduce a novel sub-resolution prescription to correct for the unresolved dynamical friction (DF) onto black holes (BHs) in cosmological simulations, to describe BH dynamics accurately, and to overcome spurious motions induced by numerical effects. Methods. We implemented a sub-resolution prescription for the unresolved DF onto BHs in the OpenGadget3 code. We carried out cosmological simulations of a volume of (16 comoving Mpc)³ and zoomed-in simulations of a galaxy group and of a galaxy cluster. We assessed the advantages of our new technique in comparison to commonly adopted methods for hampering spurious BH displacements, namely repositioning onto a local minimum of the gravitational potential and ad hoc boosting of the BH particle dynamical mass. We inspected variations in BH demography in terms of offset from the centres of the host sub-halos, the wandering population of BHs, BH–BH merger rates, and the occupation fraction of sub-halos. We also analysed the impact of the different prescriptions on individual BH interaction events in detail. Results. The newly introduced DF correction enhances the centring of BHs on host halos, the effects of which are at least comparable with those of alternative techniques. Also, the correction becomes gradually more effective as the redshift decreases. Simulations with this correction predict half as many merger events with respect to the repositioning prescription, with the advantage of being less prone to leaving substructures without any central BH. Simulations featuring our DF prescription produce a smaller (by up to ~50% with respect to repositioning) population of wandering BHs and final BH masses that are in good agreement with observations. Regarding individual BH–BH interactions, our DF model captures the gradual inspiraling of orbits before the merger occurs. By contrast, the repositioning scheme, in its most classical renditions, describes extremely fast mergers, while the dynamical mass misrepresents the dynamics of the black holes, introducing numerical scattering between the orbiting BHs. Conclusions. The novel DF correction improves the accuracy if tracking BHs within their hosts galaxies and the pathway to BH- BH mergers. This opens up new possibilities for better modeling the evolution of BH populations in cosmological simulations across different times and different environments.

Within $Z^\prime$ models, neutral meson mixing severely constrains beyond the Standard Model (SM) effects in flavour changing neutral current (FCNC) processes. However, in certain regions of the $Z^\prime$ parameter space, the contributions to meson mixing observables become negligibly small even for large $Z^\prime$ couplings. While this a priori allows for significant new physics (NP) effects in FCNC decays, we discuss how large $Z^\prime$ couplings in one neutral meson sector can generate effects in meson mixing observables of other neutral mesons, through correlations stemming from $\text{SU(2)}_L$ gauge invariance and through Renormalization Group (RG) effects in the SM Effective Field Theory~(SMEFT). This is illustrated with the example of $B_s^0-\bar B_s^0$ mixing, which in the presence of both left- and right-handed $Z^\prime bs$ couplings $\Delta_L^{bs}$ and $\Delta_R^{bs}$ remains SM-like for $\Delta_R^{bs}\approx 0.1\,\Delta_L^{bs}$. We show that in this case, large $Z^\prime bs$ couplings generate effects in $D$ and $K$ meson mixing observables, but that the $D$ and $K$ mixing constraints and the relation between $\Delta_R^{bs}$ and $\Delta_L^{bs}$ are fully compatible with a lepton flavour universality~(LFU) conserving explanation of the most recent $b\to s\ell^+\ell^-$ experimental data without violating other constraints like $e^+ e^-\to\ell^+\ell^-$ scattering. Assuming LFU, invariance under the $\text{SU(2)}_L$ gauge symmetry leads then to correlated effects in $b\to s\nu\bar\nu$ observables presently studied intensively by the Belle~II experiment, which allow to probe the $Z^\prime$ parameter space that is opened up by the vanishing NP contributions to $B_s^0-\bar B_s^0$ mixing. In this scenario the suppression of $B\to K(K^*)\mu^+\mu^-$ branching ratios implies {\em uniquely} enhancements of $B\to K(K^*)\nu\bar\nu$ branching ratios up to $20\%$.

Stable 205Tl ions have the lowest known energy threshold for capturing electron neutrinos (ve) of Eve≥50.6  keV. The Lorandite Experiment (LOREX), proposed in the 1980s, aims at obtaining the longtime averaged solar neutrino flux by utilizing natural deposits of Tl-bearing lorandite ores. To determine the ve capture cross section, it is required to know the strength of the weak transition connecting the ground state of 205Tl and the 2.3 keV first excited state in 205Pb. The only way to experimentally address this transition is to measure the bound-state beta decay (ßb) of fully ionized 205Tl81+ ions. After three decades of meticulous preparation, the half-life of the ßb decay of 205Tl81+ has been measured to be 291−27+33   days using the Experimental Storage Ring (ESR) at GSI, Darmstadt. The longer measured half-life compared to theoretical estimates reduces the expected signal-to-noise ratio in the LOREX, thus challenging its feasibility.

We discuss the relation between the Koonin-Pratt femtoscopic correlation function (CF) and invariant mass distributions from production experiments. We show that the equivalence is total for a zero source-size and that a Gaussian finite-size source provides a form-factor for the virtual production of the particles. Motivated by this remarkable relationship, we study an alternative method to the Koonin-Pratt formula, which connects the evaluation of the CF directly with the production mechanisms. The differences arise mostly from the <inline-formula><mml:math display="inline"><mml:mi>T</mml:mi></mml:math></inline-formula>–matrix quadratic terms and increase with the source size. We study the case of the <inline-formula><mml:math display="inline"><mml:msup><mml:mi>D</mml:mi><mml:mn>0</mml:mn></mml:msup><mml:msup><mml:mi>D</mml:mi><mml:mrow><mml:mo>*</mml:mo><mml:mo>+</mml:mo></mml:mrow></mml:msup></mml:math></inline-formula> and <inline-formula><mml:math display="inline"><mml:msup><mml:mi>D</mml:mi><mml:mo>+</mml:mo></mml:msup><mml:msup><mml:mi>D</mml:mi><mml:mrow><mml:mo>*</mml:mo><mml:mn>0</mml:mn></mml:mrow></mml:msup></mml:math></inline-formula> correlation functions of interest to unravel the dynamics of the exotic <inline-formula><mml:math display="inline"><mml:msub><mml:mi>T</mml:mi><mml:mrow><mml:mi>c</mml:mi><mml:mi>c</mml:mi></mml:mrow></mml:msub><mml:mo stretchy="false">(</mml:mo><mml:mn>3875</mml:mn><mml:msup><mml:mo stretchy="false">)</mml:mo><mml:mo>+</mml:mo></mml:msup></mml:math></inline-formula>, and find that these differences become quite sizable already for 1 fm sources. We nevertheless conclude that the lack of coherence in high-multiplicity-event reactions and in the creation of the fire-ball source that emits the hadrons certainly make much more realistic the formalism based on the Koonin-Pratt equation. We finally derive an improved Lednicky-Lyuboshits (LL) approach, which implements a Lorentz ultraviolet regulator that corrects the pathological behavior of the LL CF in the punctual source-size limit.

Inspired by earlier results on recursions for open-string tree-level amplitudes, and by a result of Brown and Dupont relating open- and closed-string tree-level amplitudes via single-valued periods, we identify a recursive relation for closed-string tree-level amplitudes. We achieve this by showing that closed-string analogues of Selberg integrals satisfy the Knizhnik-Zamolodchikov equation for a suitable matrix representation of the free Lie algebra on two generators, and by identifying the limits at z=1 and z=0, which are related by the Deligne associator, with N-point and (N-1)-point closed-string amplitudes, respectively.

A quantitative spectroscopic study of blue supergiant stars in the Hubble constant anchor galaxy NGC 4258 is presented. The non-LTE analysis of Keck I telescope LRIS spectra yields a central logarithmic metallicity (in units of the solar value) of [Z] = ‑0.05 ± 0.05 and a very shallow gradient of ‑(0.09 ± 0.11) r/r ₂₅ with respect to galactocentric distance in units of the isophotal radius. Good agreement with the mass–metallicity relationship of star-forming galaxies based on stellar absorption line studies is found. A comparison with H II region oxygen abundances obtained from the analysis of strong emission lines shows reasonable agreement when the M. Pettini & B. E. J. Pagel calibration is used, while the D. Zaritsky et al. calibration yields values that are 0.2–0.3 dex larger. These results allow us to put the metallicity calibration of the Cepheid period–luminosity relation in this anchor galaxy on a purely stellar basis. Interstellar reddening and extinction are determined using Hubble Space Telescope and JWST photometry. Based on extinction-corrected magnitudes, combined with the stellar effective temperatures and gravities we determine, we use the flux-weighted gravity–luminosity relationship to estimate an independent spectroscopic distance. We obtain a distance modulus m ‑ M = 29.38 ± 0.12 mag, in agreement with the geometrical distance derived from the analysis of the water maser orbits in the galaxy's central circumnuclear disk.

HD 54879 is the most recently discovered magnetic O-type star. Previous studies ruled out a rotation period shorter than 7 yr, implying that HD 54879 is the second most slowly rotating known magnetic O-type star. We report new high-resolution spectropolarimetric measurements of HD 54879, which confirm that a full stellar rotation cycle has been observed. We derive a stellar rotation period from the longitudinal magnetic field measurements of <inline-formula> </inline-formula> days (about 7.02 yr). The radial velocity of HD 54879 has been stable over the last decade of observations. We explore equivalent widths and longitudinal magnetic fields calculated from lines of different elements, and conclude the atmosphere of HD 54879 is likely chemically homogeneous, with no strong evidence for chemical stratification or lateral abundance nonuniformities. We present the first detailed magnetic map of the star, with an average surface-magnetic-field strength of 2954 G, and a strength for the dipole component of 3939 G. There is a significant amount of magnetic energy in the quadrupole components of the field (23%). Thus, we find HD 54879 has a strong magnetic field with a significantly complex topology.

Large angular scale surveys in the absence of atmosphere are essential for measuring the primordial B-mode power spectrum of the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB). Since this proposed measurement is about three to four orders of magnitude fainter than the temperature anisotropies of the CMB, in-flight calibration of the instruments and active suppression of systematic effects are crucial. We investigate the effect of changing the parameters of the scanning strategy on the in-flight calibration effectiveness, the suppression of the systematic effects themselves, and the ability to distinguish systematic effects by null-tests. Next-generation missions such as LiteBIRD, modulated by a Half-Wave Plate (HWP), will be able to observe polarisation using a single detector, eliminating the need to combine several detectors to measure polarisation, as done in many previous experiments and hence avoiding the consequent systematic effects. While the HWP is expected to suppress many systematic effects, some of them will remain. We use an analytical approach to comprehensively address the mitigation of these systematic effects and identify the characteristics of scanning strategies that are the most effective for implementing a variety of calibration strategies in the multi-dimensional space of common spacecraft scan parameters. We verify that LiteBIRD's standard configuration yields good performance on the metrics we studied. We also present Falcons.jl, a fast spacecraft scanning simulator that we developed to investigate this scanning parameter space.

We present a novel multi-messenger approach for probing nonstandard neutrino properties through the detection of gravitational waves (GWs) from collapsing stellar cores and associated supernova explosions. We show that neutrino flavor conversion inside the proto-neutron star (PNS), motivated by physics Beyond the Standard Model (BSM), can significantly boost PNS convection. This effect leads to large-amplitude GW emission over a wide frequency range during an otherwise relatively quiescent GW phase shortly after core bounce. Such a signal provides a promising new avenue for exploring nonstandard neutrino phenomena and other BSM physics impacting PNS convection.

Even in the absence of neutrino masses, a neutrino gas can exhibit a homogeneous flavor instability that leads to a periodic motion known as the fast flavor pendulum. A well-known necessary condition is a crossing of the angular flavor lepton distribution. However, in contrast to an earlier finding by two of us, the Nyquist criterion inspired by plasma physics, while being a more restrictive necessary condition, is not always sufficient. The question depends on the unstable branch of the dispersion relation being bounded by critical points that both lie under the light cone (points with subluminal phase velocity), in which case the Nyquist criterion is sufficient. While the lepton-number angle distribution, assumed to be axially symmetric, easily allows one to determine the real branch of the dispersion relation and to recognize if instead superluminal critical points exist, this graphical method does not translate into a simple instability condition. We discuss the dispersion relation for the homogeneous mode in the more general context of modes with arbitrary wave number and stress that it plays no special role on this continuum, except for its regular but fragile long-term behavior owed to its many symmetries.

We present ultraviolet, optical, and near-infrared photometric and optical spectroscopic observations of the luminous fast blue optical transient (LFBOT) CSS 161010:045834–081803 (CSS 161010). The transient was found in a low-redshift (z = 0.033) dwarf galaxy. The light curves of CSS 161010 are characterized by an extremely fast evolution and blue colors. The V-band light curve shows that CSS 161010 reaches an absolute peak of <inline-formula> </inline-formula> mag in 3.8 days from the start of the outburst. After maximum, CSS 161010 follows a power-law decline ∝t ^‑2.8±0.1 in all optical bands. These photometric properties are comparable to those of well-observed LFBOTs such as AT 2018cow, AT 2020mrf, and AT 2020xnd. However, unlike these objects, the spectra of CSS 161010 show a remarkable transformation from a blue and featureless continuum to spectra dominated by very broad, entirely blueshifted hydrogen emission lines with velocities of up to 10% of the speed of light. The persistent blueshifted emission and the lack of any emission at the rest wavelength of CSS 161010 are unique features not seen in any transient before CSS 161010. The combined observational properties of CSS 161010 and its M _* ∼ 10⁸ M _⊙ dwarf galaxy host favor the tidal disruption of a star by an intermediate-mass black hole as its origin.

We assess the capabilities of the LiteBIRD mission to map the hot gas distribution in the Universe through the thermal Sunyaev-Zeldovich (SZ) effect. Our analysis relies on comprehensive simulations incorporating various sources of Galactic and extragalactic foreground emission, while accounting for the specific instrumental characteristics of the LiteBIRD mission, such as detector sensitivities, frequency-dependent beam convolution, inhomogeneous sky scanning, and 1/f noise. We implement a tailored component-separation pipeline to map the thermal SZ Compton y-parameter over 98% of the sky. Despite lower angular resolution for galaxy cluster science, LiteBIRD provides full-sky coverage and, compared to the Planck satellite, enhanced sensitivity, as well as more frequency bands to enable the construction of an all-sky thermal SZ y-map, with reduced foreground contamination at large and intermediate angular scales. By combining LiteBIRD and Planck channels in the component-separation pipeline, we also obtain an optimal y-map that leverages the advantages of both experiments, with the higher angular resolution of the Planck channels enabling the recovery of compact clusters beyond the LiteBIRD beam limitations, and the numerous sensitive LiteBIRD channels further mitigating foregrounds. The added value of LiteBIRD is highlighted through the examination of maps, power spectra, and one-point statistics of the various sky components. After component separation, the 1/f noise from LiteBIRD's intensity channels is effectively mitigated below the level of the thermal SZ signal at all multipoles. Cosmological constraints on S ₈ = σ ₈ (Ω_m /0.3)^0.5 obtained from the LiteBIRD-Planck combined y-map power spectrum exhibits a 15 % reduction in uncertainty compared to constraints derived from Planck alone. This improvement can be attributed to the increased portion of uncontaminated sky available in the LiteBIRD-Planck combined y-map.

The goal of this paper is to make a connection between tropical geometry, representations of quantum affine algebras, and scattering amplitudes in physics. The connection allows us to study important and difficult questions in these areas: (1)We give a systematic construction of prime modules (including prime non-real modules) of quantum affine algebras using tropical geometry. We also introduce new objects which generalize positive tropical Grassmannians.(2)We propose a generalization of Grassmannian string integrals in physics, in which the integrand is a product indexed by prime modules of a quantum affine algebra. We give a general formula of u-variables using prime tableaux (corresponding to prime modules of quantum affine algebras of type A) and Auslander–Reiten quivers of Grassmannian cluster categories.(3)We study limit g-vectors of cluster algebras. This is another way to obtain prime non-real modules of quantum affine algebras systematically. Using limit g-vectors, we construct new examples of non-real modules of quantum affine algebras. We give a systematic construction of prime modules (including prime non-real modules) of quantum affine algebras using tropical geometry. We also introduce new objects which generalize positive tropical Grassmannians. We propose a generalization of Grassmannian string integrals in physics, in which the integrand is a product indexed by prime modules of a quantum affine algebra. We give a general formula of u-variables using prime tableaux (corresponding to prime modules of quantum affine algebras of type A) and Auslander–Reiten quivers of Grassmannian cluster categories. We study limit g-vectors of cluster algebras. This is another way to obtain prime non-real modules of quantum affine algebras systematically. Using limit g-vectors, we construct new examples of non-real modules of quantum affine algebras.

This report summarizes the work of the EMMI Rapid Reaction Task Force on "Real and Virtual Photon Production at Ultra-Low Transverse Momentum and Low Mass at the LHC". We provide an overview of the soft-photon puzzle, i.e., of the long-standing discrepancy between experimental data and predictions based on Low's soft-photon theorem, also referred to as "anomalous" soft photon production, and we review the current theoretical understanding of soft radiation and soft theorems. We also focus on low-mass dileptons as a tool for determining the electrical conductivity of the medium produced in high-energy nucleus–nucleus collisions. We discuss how both topics can be addressed with the planned ALICE 3 detector at the LHC.

The stellar haloes of dwarf galaxies are becoming an object of interest in the extragalactic community due to their detection in some recent observations. Additionally, new cosmological simulations of very high resolution were performed, allowing their study. These stellar haloes could help shed light on our understanding of the assembly of dwarf galaxies and their evolution, and allow us to test the hierarchical model for the formation of structures at small scales. We aim to characterise the stellar haloes of simulated dwarf galaxies and analyse their evolution and accretion history. We use a sample of 17 simulated galaxies from the Auriga Project with a stellar mass range from 3.28x10^8 Msun to 2.08x10^10 Msun. We define the stellar halo as the stellar material located outside an ellipsoid with semi-major axes equal to 4 times the half light radius (Rh) of each galaxy. We find that the inner regions of the stellar halo (4 to 6 times the Rh) are dominated by in-situ material. For the less massive simulated dwarfs (M*<=4.54x10^8 Msun), this dominance extends to all radii. We find that this in-situ stellar halo is mostly formed in the inner regions of the galaxies and then ejected into the outskirts during interactions and merger events. In ~50% of the galaxies, the stripped gas from satellites contributed to the formation of this in-situ halo. The stellar haloes of the galaxies more massive than M*>=1x10^9 Msun are dominated by the accreted component beyond 6 Rh. We find that the more massive dwarf galaxies accrete stellar material until later times (t90~4.44 Gyr ago, being t90 the formation time) than the less massive ones (t90~8.17 Gyr ago), impacting on the formation time of the accreted stellar haloes. The galaxies have a range of 1 to 7 significant progenitors contributing to their accreted component but there is no correlation between this quantity and the galaxies' accreted mass.

A novel coalescence process is shown to take place in plasma fluid simulations, leading to the formation of large-scale magnetic islands that become dynamically important in the system. The parametric dependence of the process on the plasma $\beta$ and the background magnetic shear is studied, and the process is broken down at a fundamental level, allowing to clearly identify its causes and dynamics. The formation of magnetic-island-like structures at the spatial scale of the unstable modes is observed quite early in the non-linear phase of the simulation for most cases studied, as the unstable modes change their structure from interchange-like to tearing-like. This is followed by a slow coalescence process that evolves these magnetic structures towards larger and larger scales, adding to the large-scale tearing-like modes that already form by direct coupling of neighbouring unstable modes, but remain sub-dominant without the contribution from the smaller scales through coalescence. The presence of the cubic non-linearities retained in the model is essential in the dynamics of this process. The zonal fields are key actors of the overall process, acting as mediators between the competitive mechanisms from which Turbulence Driven Magnetic Islands can develop. The zonal current is found to slow down the formation of large-scale magnetic islands, acting as an inhibitor, while the zonal flow is needed to allow the system to transfer energy to the larger scales, acting as a catalyst for the island formation process.

Brown dwarfs are the bridge between low-mass stars and giant planets. One way of shedding light on their dominant formation mechanism is to study them at the earliest stages of their evolution, when they are deeply embedded in their parental clouds. Several works have identified pre- and proto-brown dwarfs candidates using different observational approaches. The aim of this work is to create a database with all the objects classified as very young substellar candidates in the litearature in order to study them in an homogeneous way. We have gathered all the information about very young substellar candidates available in the literature until 2020. We have retrieved their published photometry from the optical to the centimeter regime, and we have written our own codes to derive their bolometric temperatures and luminosities, and their internal luminosities. We have also populated the database with other parameters extracted from the literature, like e.g. the envelope masses, their detection in some molecular species, and presence of outflows. The result of our search is the SUCANES database, containing 174 objects classified as potential very young substellar candidates in the literature. We present an analysis of the main properties of the retrieved objects. Since we have updated the distances to several star forming regions, this has allowed us to reject some candidates based on their internal luminosities. We have also discussed the derived physical parameters and envelope masses for the best substellar candidates isolated in SUCANES. As an example of a scientific exploitation of this database, we present a feasibility study for the detection of radiojets with upcoming facilities: the ngVLA and the SKA interferometers. The SUCANES database is accessible through a Graphical User Interface and it is open to any potential user.

While supervised neural networks have become state of the art for identifying the rare strong gravitational lenses from large imaging data sets, their selection remains significantly affected by the large number and diversity of non-lens contaminants. This work evaluates and compares systematically the performance of neural networks in order to move towards a rapid selection of galaxy-scale strong lenses with minimal human input in the era of deep, wide-scale surveys. We used multiband images from PDR2 of the Hyper-Suprime Cam (HSC) Wide survey to build test sets mimicking an actual classification experiment, with 189 securely-identified strong lenses from the literature over the HSC footprint and 70 910 non-lens galaxies in COSMOS covering representative lens-like morphologies. Multiple networks were trained on different sets of realistic strong-lens simulations and non-lens galaxies, with various architectures and data preprocessing, mainly using the deepest gri-bands. Most networks reached excellent area under the Receiver Operating Characteristic (ROC) curves on the test set of 71 099 objects, and we determined the ingredients to optimize the true positive rate for a total number of false positives equal to zero or 10 (TPR₀ and TPR₁₀). The overall performances strongly depend on the construction of the ground-truth training data and they typically, but not systematically, improve using our baseline residual network architecture presented in Paper VI (Cañameras et al., A&A, 653, L6). TPR₀ tends to be higher for ResNets (≃ 10–40%) compared to AlexNet-like networks or G-CNNs. Improvements are found when (1) applying random shifts to the image centroids, (2) using square-root scaled images to enhance faint arcs, (3) adding z-band to the otherwise used gri-bands, or (4) using random viewpoints of the original images. In contrast, we find no improvement when adding g – αi difference images (where α is a tuned constant) to subtract emission from the central galaxy. The most significant gain is obtained with committees of networks trained on different data sets, with a moderate overlap between populations of false positives. Nearly-perfect invariance to image quality can be achieved by using realistic PSF models in our lens simulation pipeline, and by training networks either with large number of bands, or jointly with the PSF and science frames. Overall, we show the possibility to reach a TPR₀ as high as 60% for the test sets under consideration, which opens promising perspectives for pure selection of strong lenses without human input using the Rubin Observatory and other forthcoming ground-based surveys.

Metals in the diffuse, ionized gas at the boundary between the Milky Way's interstellar medium (ISM) and circumgalactic medium, known as the disk–halo interface (DHI), are valuable tracers of the feedback processes that drive the Galactic fountain. However, metallicity measurements in this region are challenging due to obscuration by the Milky Way ISM and uncertain ionization corrections that affect the total hydrogen column density. In this work, we constrain ionization corrections to neutral hydrogen column densities using precisely measured electron column densities from the dispersion measures of pulsars that lie in the same globular clusters as UV-bright targets with high-resolution absorption spectroscopy. We address the blending of absorption lines with the ISM by jointly fitting Voigt profiles to all absorption components. We present our metallicity estimates for the DHI of the Milky Way based on detailed photoionization modeling of the absorption from ionized metal lines and ionization-corrected total hydrogen columns. Generally, the gas clouds show a large scatter in metallicity, ranging between 0.04 and 3.2 Z _⊙, implying that the DHI consists of a mixture of gaseous structures having multiple origins. We estimate the inflow and outflow timescales of the DHI ionized clouds to be 6–35 Myr. We report the detection of an infalling cloud with supersolar metallicity that suggests a Galactic fountain mechanism, whereas at least one low-metallicity outflowing cloud (Z < 0.1 Z _⊙) poses a challenge for Galactic fountain and feedback models.

A generalization of Wilson line operators at subleading power in the soft expansion has been recently introduced as an efficient building block of gravitational scattering amplitudes for non-spinning objects. The classical limit in this picture corresponds to the strict Regge limit, where the Post-Minkowskian (PM) expansion corresponds to the soft expansion, interpreted as a sum over correlations of soft emissions. Building on the well-studied worldline model with ${\cal N}=1$ supersymmetry, in this work we extend the generalized Wilson line (GWL) approach to the case of spinning gravitating bodies. Specifically, at the quantum level we derive from first-principles a representation for the spin $1/2$ GWL that is relevant for the all-order factorization of next-to-soft gravitons with fermionic matter, thus generalizing the exponentiation of single-emission next-to-soft theorems. At the classical level, we identity the suitable generalization of Wilson line operators that enables the generation of classical spin observables at linear order in spin. Thanks to the crucial role played by the soft expansion, the map from Grassmann variables to classical spin is manifest. We also comment on the relation between the GWL approach and the Worldline Quantum Field Theory as well as the Heavy Mass Effective Theory formalism. We validate the approach by rederiving known results in the conservative sector at 2PM order.

Multi-messenger observations of astrophysical transients provide powerful probes of the underlying physics of the source as well as beyond the Standard Model effects. We explore transients that can occur in the vicinity of supermassive black holes at the center of galaxies, including tidal disruption events (TDEs), certain types of blazars, or even supernovae. In such environments, the dark matter (DM) density can be extremely high, resembling a dense spike or core. We study a novel effect of neutrino diffusion sustained via frequent scatterings off DM particles in these regions. We show that for transients occurring within DM spikes or cores, the DM-neutrino scattering can delay the arrival of neutrinos with respect to photons, but this also comes with a suppression of the neutrino flux and energy loss. We apply these effects to the specific example of TDEs, and demonstrate that currently unconstrained parameter space of DM-neutrino interactions can account for the sizable $O$(days) delay of the tentative high-energy neutrinos observed from some TDEs.

Cosmic shear, galaxy clustering, and the abundance of massive halos each probe the large-scale structure of the universe in complementary ways. We present cosmological constraints from the joint analysis of the three probes, building on the latest analyses of the lensing-informed abundance of clusters identified by the South Pole Telescope (SPT) and of the auto- and cross-correlation of galaxy position and weak lensing measurements (3$\times$2pt) in the Dark Energy Survey (DES). We consider the cosmological correlation between the different tracers and we account for the systematic uncertainties that are shared between the large-scale lensing correlation functions and the small-scale lensing-based cluster mass calibration. Marginalized over the remaining $\Lambda$CDM parameters (including the sum of neutrino masses) and 52 astrophysical modeling parameters, we measure $\Omega_\mathrm{m}=0.300\pm0.017$ and $\sigma_8=0.797\pm0.026$. Compared to constraints from Planck primary CMB anisotropies, our constraints are only 15% wider with a probability to exceed of 0.22 ($1.2\sigma$) for the two-parameter difference. We further obtain $S_8\equiv\sigma_8(\Omega_\mathrm{m}/0.3)^{0.5}=0.796\pm0.013$ which is lower than the Planck measurement at the $1.6\sigma$ level. The combined SPT cluster, DES 3$\times$2pt, and Planck datasets mildly prefer a non-zero positive neutrino mass, with a 95% upper limit $\sum m_\nu<0.25~\mathrm{eV}$ on the sum of neutrino masses. Assuming a $w$CDM model, we constrain the dark energy equation of state parameter $w=-1.15^{+0.23}_{-0.17}$ and when combining with Planck primary CMB anisotropies, we recover $w=-1.20^{+0.15}_{-0.09}$, a $1.7\sigma$ difference with a cosmological constant. The precision of our results highlights the benefits of multiwavelength multiprobe cosmology.

Muon conversion is one of the best probes of charged lepton flavor violation. The experimental limit is soon expected to improve by four orders of magnitude, thus calling for precise predictions on the theory side. Equally important are precise predictions for muon decay-in-orbit, the main background for muon conversion. While the calculation of electromagnetic corrections to the two processes above the nuclear scale does not involve significant challenges, it becomes substantially more complex below that scale due to multiple scales, bound-state effects and experimental setup. Here, we present a systematic framework that addresses these challenges by resorting to a series of effective field theories. Combining Heavy Quark Effective Theory (HQET), Non-Relativistic QED (NRQED), potential NRQED, Soft-Collinear Effective Theory I and II, and boosted HQET, we derive a factorization theorem and present the renormalization group equations. Our framework allows for the proper calculation of precise predictions for the rates of the two processes, with crucial implications for the upcoming muon conversion searches. We also provide the most accurate prediction of the signal shape for those searches.

We describe an algorithm to organize Feynman integrals in terms of their infrared properties. Our approach builds upon the theory of Landau singularities, which we use to classify all configurations of loop momenta that can give rise to infrared divergences. We then construct bases of numerators for arbitrary Feynman integrals, which cancel all singularities and render the integrals finite. Through the same analysis, one can also classify so-called evanescent and evanescently finite Feynman integrals. These are integrals whose vanishing or finiteness relies on properties of dimensional regularization. To illustrate the use of these integrals, we display how to obtain a simpler form for the leading-color two-loop four-gluon scattering amplitude through the choice of a suitable basis of finite integrals. In particular, when all gluon helicities are equal, we show that with our basis the most complicated double-box integrals do not contribute to the finite remainder of the scattering amplitude.

Context. Milky Way star clusters provide important clues about the history of star formation in our Galaxy. However, the dust in the disk and in the innermost regions hides them from the observers. Aims. Our goal is twofold. First, to detect new clusters – we have applied the newest methods of detecting clusters with the best available wide-field sky surveys in the mid-infrared because they are the least affected by extinction. Second, we address the question of cluster detection's completeness, for now limiting it to the most massive star clusters. Methods. This search is based on the mid-infrared Galactic Legacy Infrared Mid-Plane Survey Extraordinaire (GLIMPSE), to minimize the effect of dust extinction. The search Ordering Points To Identify the Clustering Structure (OPTICS) clustering algorithm was applied to identify clusters, after excluding the bluest, presumably foreground sources, to improve the cluster-to-field contrast. The success rate for cluster identification was estimated with a semi-empirical simulation that adds clusters, based on the real objects, to the point source catalog, to be recovered later with the same search algorithm that was used in the search for new cluster candidates. As a first step, this was limited to the most massive star clusters with a total mass of ~10⁴ M_⊙. Results. Our automated search, combined with inspection of the color-magnitude diagrams and images, yielded 659 cluster candidates; 106 of these appear to have been previously identified, suggesting that a large hidden population of star clusters still exists in the inner Milky Way. However, the search for the simulated supermassive clusters achieves a recovery rate of 70–95%, depending on the distance and extinction toward them. Conclusions. The new candidates – if confirmed – indicate that the Milky Way still harbors a sizeable population of unknown clusters. However, they must be objects of modest richness, because our simulation indicates that there is no substantial hidden population of supermassive clusters in the central region of our Galaxy.

We investigate the interaction between a shock-driven hot wind and a cold multi-cloud layer, for conditions commonly found in interstellar and circumgalactic gas. We present a method for identifying distinct clouds using a Friends-of-Friends algorithm. This approach unveils novel detailed information about individual clouds and their collective behaviour. By tracing the evolution of individual clouds, our method provides comprehensive descriptions of cloud morphology, including measures of the elongation and fractal dimension. Combining the kinematics and morphology of clouds, we refine previous models for drag and entrainment processes. Our by-cloud analysis allows to discern the dominant entrainment processes at different times. We find that after the initial shock passage, momentum transfer due to condensation becomes increasingly important, compared to ram pressure, which dominates at early times. We also find that internal motions within clouds act as an effective dynamic pressure that exceeds the thermal pressure by an order of magnitude. Our analysis shows how the highly efficient cooling of the warm mixed gas at temperatures $\sim 10^{5}$ K is effectively balanced by the kinetic energy injected by the hot wind into the warm and cold phases via shocks and shear motions. Compression-driven condensation and turbulence dissipation maintain a multi-phase outflow and can help explain the presence of dense gas in galaxy-scale winds. Finally, we show that applying our Friends-of-Friends analysis to $\rm{H}_\rm{I}$-emitting gas and correcting for beam size and telescope sensitivity can explain two populations of $\rm{H}_\rm{I}$ clouds within the Milky-Way nuclear wind as structures pertaining to the same outflow.

Modern spectroscopic surveys can only target a small fraction of the vast amount of photometrically cataloged sources in wide-field surveys. Here, we report the development of a generative artificial intelligence (AI) method capable of predicting optical galaxy spectra from photometric broadband images alone. This method draws from the latest advances in diffusion models in combination with contrastive networks. We pass multiband galaxy images into the architecture to obtain optical spectra. From these, robust values for galaxy properties can be derived with any methods in the spectroscopic toolbox, such as standard population synthesis techniques and Lick indices. When trained and tested on 64 × 64 pixel images from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey, the global bimodality of star-forming and quiescent galaxies in photometric space is recovered, as well as a mass–metallicity relation of star-forming galaxies. The comparison between the observed and the artificially created spectra shows good agreement in overall metallicity, age, Dn4000, stellar velocity dispersion, and E(B ‑ V) values. Photometric redshift estimates of our generative algorithm can compete with other current, specialized deep learning techniques. Moreover, this work is the first attempt in the literature to infer velocity dispersion from photometric images. Additionally, we can predict the presence of an active galactic nucleus up to an accuracy of 82%. With our method, scientifically interesting galaxy properties, normally requiring spectroscopic inputs, can be obtained in future data sets from large-scale photometric surveys alone. The spectra prediction via AI can further assist in creating realistic mock catalogs.

The leading and next-to-leading order QCD predictions for Higgs boson pair production at hadron colliders suffer from a significant mass renormalisation scheme uncertainty related to the choice of the top-quark mass. The functional dependence of the result on the value of the intermediate quark mass can be understood in the high-energy limit using the Method of Regions and the tools of Soft-Collinear Effective Theory. In this work, we study the origin of the sizeable logarithmic mass corrections in the $gg \to HH$ amplitudes at leading and next-to-leading power in the limit $s,|t|,|u| \gg m_t^2 \gg m_H^2$. We argue that the mass corrections follow a predictable factorised pattern that can be exploited to simplify their computation. We present results for the leading power leading logarithmic corrections, our analysis leads to a significant reduction in the theoretical uncertainty of the double Higgs production amplitudes at high-energy due to the top-quark mass scheme.

Dense neutrino gases can exhibit collective flavor instabilities, triggering large flavor conversions that are driven primarily by neutrino-neutrino refraction. One broadly distinguishes between fast instabilities that exist in the limit of vanishing neutrino masses, and slow ones, that require neutrino mass splittings. In a related series of papers, we have shown that fast instabilities result from the resonant growth of flavor waves, in the same way as turbulent electric fields in an unstable plasma. Here we extend this framework to slow instabilities, focusing on the simplest case of an infinitely homogeneous medium with axisymmetric neutrino distribution. The relevant length and time scales are defined by three parameters: the vacuum oscillation frequency $\omega_E=\delta m^2/2E$, the scale of neutrino-neutrino refraction energy $\mu=\sqrt{2}G_F(n_\nu+n_{\overline\nu})$, and the ratio between lepton and particle number $\epsilon=(n_\nu-n_{\overline\nu})/(n_\nu+n_{\overline\nu})$. We distinguish between two very different regimes: (i) For $\omega_E\ll \mu \epsilon^2$, instabilities occur at small spatial scales of order $(\mu\epsilon)^{-1}$ with a time scale of order $\epsilon \omega_E^{-1}$. This novel branch of slow instability arises from resonant interactions with neutrinos moving along the axis of symmetry. (ii) For $\mu \epsilon^2\ll \omega_E\ll \mu$, the instability is strongly non-resonant, with typical time and length scales of order $1/\sqrt{\omega_E \mu}$. Unstable modes interact with all neutrino directions at once, recovering the characteristic scaling of the traditional studies of slow instabilities. In the inner regions of supernovae and neutron-star mergers, the first regime may be more likely to appear, meaning that slow instabilities in this region may have an entirely different character than usually envisaged.

Making inferences about physical properties of the Universe requires knowledge of the data likelihood. A Gaussian distribution is commonly assumed for the uncertainties with a covariance matrix estimated from a set of simulations. The noise in such covariance estimates causes two problems: it distorts the width of the parameter contours, and it adds scatter to the location of those contours which is not captured by the widths themselves. For non-Gaussian likelihoods, an approximation may be derived via Simulation-Based Inference (SBI). It is often implicitly assumed that parameter constraints from SBI analyses, which do not use covariance matrices, are not affected by the same problems as parameter estimation with a covariance matrix estimated from simulations. We investigate whether SBI suffers from effects similar to those of covariance estimation in Gaussian likelihoods. We use Neural Posterior and Likelihood Estimation with continuous and masked autoregressive normalizing flows for density estimation. We fit our approximate posterior models to simulations drawn from a Gaussian linear model, so that the SBI result can be compared to the true posterior. We test linear and neural network based compression, demonstrating that neither methods circumvent the issues of covariance estimation. SBI suffers an inflation of posterior variance that is equal or greater than the analytical result in covariance estimation for Gaussian likelihoods for the same number of simulations. The assumption that SBI requires a smaller number of simulations than covariance estimation for a Gaussian likelihood analysis is inaccurate. The limitations of traditional likelihood analysis with simulation-based covariance remain for SBI with a finite simulation budget. Despite these issues, we show that SBI correctly draws the true posterior contour given enough simulations.

Transmission spectroscopy is a prime method to study the atmospheres of extrasolar planets. We obtained a high-resolution spectral transit time series of the hot Jupiter WASP-121 b with CRIRES+ to study its atmosphere via transmission spectroscopy of the He I λ10833 triplet lines. Our analysis shows a prominent He I λ10833 absorption feature moving along with the planetary orbital motion, which shows an observed, transit-averaged equivalent width of approximately 30 mÅ, a slight redshift, and a depth of about 2%, which can only be explained by an atmosphere overflowing its Roche lobe. We carried out 3D hydrodynamic modeling to reproduce the observations, which favors asymmetric mass loss with a more pronounced leading tidal tail, possibly also explaining observational evidence for additional absorption stationary in the stellar rest frame. A trailing tail is not detectable. From our modeling, we derived estimates of ≥2 × 10¹³ g s^‑1 for the stellar and 5.4 × 10¹² g s^‑1 for the planetary mass loss rate, which is consistent with X-ray and extreme-ultraviolet (XUV) driven mass loss in WASP-121 b.

We present a novel way of probing non-gravitational dark matter interactions: dark astronomy, which leverages the dark radiation emitted by dissipative dark sectors. If the mediator of the dark matter self interactions is a dark photon with a small mass that kinetically mixes with the visible photon, the dark radiation flux becomes accessible to underground experiments. We argue that the emission may be dominantly longitudinally polarized, thereby enhancing the sensitivity of direct detection experiments such as XENON and SENSEI to this signal. We introduce a new detection mechanism based on resonant dark-photon-to-photon conversion at the surface of conducting materials, which offers unique directional sensitivity to dark radiation. This mechanism facilitates the development of experiments that combine dark matter detection techniques with methods of traditional astronomy, opening the possibility to map dark radiation sources within our galaxy.

The impact of the dynamical state of gas-rich satellite galaxies at the early moments of their infall into their host systems and the relation to their quenching process are not completely understood at the low-mass regime. Two such nearby systems are the infalling Milky Way (MW) dwarfs Leo T and Phoenix located near the MW virial radius at 414 kpc (1.4R_vir), both of which present intriguing offsets between their gaseous and stellar distributions. Here we present hydrodynamic simulations with RAMSES to reproduce the observed dynamics of Leo T: its 80 pc stellar-HI offset and the 35 pc offset between its older (≳5 Gyr) and younger (∼200 ‑ 1000 Myr) stellar population. We considered internal and environmental properties such as stellar winds, two HI components, cored and cuspy dark matter profiles, and different satellite orbits considering the MW circumgalactic medium. We find that the models that best match the observed morphology of the gas and stars include mild stellar winds that interact with the HI generating the observed offset, and dark matter profiles with extended cores. The latter allow long oscillations of the off-centred younger stellar component, due to long mixing timescales (≳200 Myr), and the slow precession of near-closed orbits in the cored potentials; instead, cuspy and compact cored dark matter models result in the rapid mixing of the material (≲200 Myr). These models predict that non-equilibrium substructures, such as spatial and kinematic offsets, are likely to persist in cored low-mass dwarfs and to remain detectable on long timescales in systems with recent star formation.

We construct the equation of state of hypernuclear matter and study the structure of neutron stars employing a chiral hyperon-nucleon interaction of the Jülich--Bonn group tuned to femtoscopic $\Lambda p$ data of the ALICE collaboration, and $\Lambda\Lambda$ and $\Xi$N interactions determined from Lattice QCD calculations by the HAL QCD collaboration that reproduce the femtoscopic $\Lambda\Lambda$ and $\Xi^-p$ data. We employ the ab-initio microscopic Brueckner--Hartree--Fock theory extended to the strange baryon sector. A special focus is put on the uncertainties of the hyperon interactions and how they are effectively propagated to the composition, equation of state, and mass-radius relation of neutron stars. To such end, we consider the uncertainty due to the experimental error of the femtoscopic $\Lambda p$ data used to fix the chiral hyperon-nucleon interaction and the theoretical uncertainty, estimated from the residual cut-off dependence of this interaction. We find that the final maximum mass of a neutron star with hyperons is in the range $1.3-1.4$ $M_\odot$, in agreement with previous works. The hyperon puzzle, therefore, remains still an open issue if only two-body hyperon-nucleon and hyperon-hyperon interactions are considered.

We critically reconsider the argument based on 't Hooft anomaly matching that aims at proving chiral symmetry breaking in confining four-dimensional quantum chromodynamics-like theories with <inline-formula><mml:math display="inline"><mml:msub><mml:mi>N</mml:mi><mml:mi>c</mml:mi></mml:msub><mml:mo>></mml:mo><mml:mn>2</mml:mn></mml:math></inline-formula> colors and <inline-formula><mml:math display="inline"><mml:msub><mml:mi>N</mml:mi><mml:mi>f</mml:mi></mml:msub></mml:math></inline-formula> flavors. The main line of reasoning relies on a property of the solutions of the anomaly matching and persistent mass equations called <inline-formula><mml:math display="inline"><mml:msub><mml:mi>N</mml:mi><mml:mi>f</mml:mi></mml:msub></mml:math></inline-formula>-independence. In previous works, the validity of <inline-formula><mml:math display="inline"><mml:msub><mml:mi>N</mml:mi><mml:mi>f</mml:mi></mml:msub></mml:math></inline-formula>-independence was assumed based on qualitative arguments, but it was never proven rigorously. We provide a detailed proof and clarify under which (dynamical) conditions it holds. Our results are valid for a generic spectrum of massless composite fermions including baryons and exotics.

We carried out long-term monitoring of the LIGO/Virgo/KAGRA binary black hole (BBH) merger candidate S230922g in search of electromagnetic emission from the interaction of the merger remnant with an embedding active galactic nuclei (AGN) accretion disk. Using a dataset primarily composed of wide-field imaging from the Dark Energy Camera and supplemented by additional photometric and spectroscopic resources, we searched <inline-formula><mml:math display="inline"><mml:mo>∼</mml:mo><mml:mn>70</mml:mn><mml:mo>%</mml:mo></mml:math></inline-formula> of the sky area probability for transient phenomena and discovered six counterpart candidates. One especially promising candidate—AT 2023aagj—exhibited temporally varying asymmetric components in spectral broad line regions, a feature potentially indicative of an off-center event such as a BBH merger. This represents the first live search and multiwavelength, photometric, and spectroscopic monitoring of a gravitational wave BBH optical counterpart candidate in the disk of an AGN.

The projected sensitivity of the effective electron neutrino-mass measurement with the KATRIN experiment is below 0.3 eV (90 % CL) after 5 years of data acquisition. The sensitivity is affected by the increased rate of the background electrons from KATRIN's main spectrometer. A special shifted-analysing-plane (SAP) configuration was developed to reduce this background by a factor of two. The complex layout of electromagnetic fields in the SAP configuration requires a robust method of estimating these fields. We present in this paper a dedicated calibration measurement of the fields using conversion electrons of gaseous <inline-formula id="IEq1"><mml:math id="IEq1_Math"><mml:mmultiscripts><mml:mrow></mml:mrow><mml:mrow></mml:mrow><mml:mtext>83m</mml:mtext></mml:mmultiscripts></mml:math></inline-formula>Kr, which enables the neutrino-mass measurements in the SAP configuration.

We calculate the four-graviton scattering amplitude in Type II superstring theory at one-loop up to seventh order in the low-energy expansion through the recently developed iterated integral formalism of Modular Graph Functions (MGFs). We propose a new assignment of transcendental weight to the numbers that appear in the amplitude, which leads to a violation of uniform transcendentality. Furthermore, the machinery of the novel method allows us to propose a general form of the amplitude, which suggests that the expansion is expressible in terms of single-valued multiple zeta values and logarithmic derivatives of the Riemann zeta function at positive and negative odd integers.

This chapter reviews the three-dimensional structure, age, kinematics, and chemistry of the Milky Way (MW) region within ~2 kpc from its center (hereafter referred to as the 'bulge') from an observational perspective. While not exhaustive in citations, this review provides historical context and discusses the main controversies and limitations in the current consensus. The nuclear bulge region, within $\sim$200 pc from the Galactic center, has been excluded from this review. This very complex region, hosting dense molecular clouds and active star formation, would deserve a dedicated paper.

Accretion-induced collapse (AIC) or merger-induced collapse (MIC) of white dwarfs (WDs) in binary systems is an interesting path to neutron star (NS) and magnetar formation, alternative to stellar core collapse and NS mergers. Such events could add a population of compact remnants in globular clusters, they are expected to produce yet unidentified electromagnetic transients including gamma-ray and radio bursts, and to act as sources of trans-iron elements, neutrinos, and gravitational waves. Here we present the first long-term (>5 s post bounce) hydrodynamical simulations in axi-symmetry (2D), using energy- and velocity-dependent three-flavor neutrino transport based on a two-moment scheme. Our set of six models includes initial WD configurations for different masses, central densities, rotation rates, and angular momentum profiles. Our simulations demonstrate that rotation plays a crucial role for the proto-neutron star (PNS) evolution and ejecta properties. We find early neutron-rich ejecta and an increasingly proton-rich neutrino-driven wind at later times in a non-rotating model, in agreement with electron-capture supernova models. In contrast to that and different from previous results, our rotating models eject proton-rich material initially and increasingly more neutron-rich matter as time advances, because an extended accretion torus forms around the PNS and feeds neutrino-driven bipolar outflows for many seconds. AIC and MIC events are thus potential sites of r-process element production, which may imply constraints on their occurrence rates. Finally, our simulations neglect the effects of triaxial deformation and magnetic fields, serving as a temporary benchmark for more comprehensive future studies.

Chemical clocks based on [s-process elements/alpha-elements] ratios are widely used to estimate ages of Galactic stellar populations. However, the [s/alpha] vs. age relations are not universal, varying with metallicity, location in the Galactic disc, and specific s-process elements. Current Galactic chemical evolution models struggle to reproduce the observed [s/alpha] increase at young ages. We provide chemical evolution models for the Milky Way disc to identify the conditions required to reproduce the observed [s/H], [s/Fe], and [s/alpha] vs. age relations. We adopt a multi-zone chemical evolution model including state-of-the-art nucleosynthesis prescriptions for neutron-capture elements (AGB stars, rotating massive stars, neutron star mergers, magneto-driven supernovae). We explore variations in gas infall, AGB yield dependencies on progenitor stars, and rotational velocity distributions for massive stars. Results are compared with open cluster data from the Gaia-ESO survey. A three-infall scenario for disc formation captures the rise of [s/alpha] with age in the outer regions but fails in the inner ones, especially for second s-process peak elements. Ba production in the last 3 Gyr of chemical evolution would need to increase by half to match observations. S-process contributions from low-mass AGB stars improve predictions but require increases not supported by nucleosynthesis calculations, even with potential i-process contribution. Variations in the metallicity dependence of AGB yields show inconsistent effects across elements. Distributions of massive star rotational velocities fail to improve results due to balanced effects on elements. We confirm that there is no single relationship [s/alpha] vs. age, but that it varies along the MW disc. Current prescriptions for neutron-capture element yields cannot fully capture the complexity of evolution, particularly in the inner disc.

Superclusters are the most massive structures in the universe. To what degree they are actually bound against an accelerating expansion of the background is of significant cosmological and astrophysical interest. In this study, we introduce a cross matched set of superclusters from the SLOW constrained simulations of the local (z<0.05) universe. Identifying the superclusters provides estimates on the efficacy of the constraints in reproducing the local large-scale structure accurately. The simulated counterparts can help identifying possible future observational targets containing interesting features such as bridges between pre-merging and merging galaxy clusters and collapsing filaments and provide comparisons for current observations. By determining the collapse volumes for the superclusters we further elucidate the dynamics of cluster-cluster interactions in those regions. Using catalogs of local superclusters and the most massive simulated clusters, we search for counterparts of supercluster members of six regions. We evaluate the significance of these detections by comparing their geometries to supercluster regions in random simulations. We then run an N-body version of the simulation into the far future and determine which of the member clusters are gravitationally bound to the host superclusters. Furthermore we compute masses and density contrasts for the collapse regions. We demonstrate the SLOW simulation of the local universe to accurately reproduce local supercluster regions in mass of their members and three-dimensional geometrical arrangement. We furthermore find the bound regions of the local superclusters consistent in size and density contrast with previous theoretical studies. This will allow to connect future numerical zoom-in studies of the clusters to the large scale environments and specifically the supercluster environments these local galaxy clusters evolve in.

We update the Standard Model (SM) predictions for the lifetimes of the $B^+$, $B_d$ and $B_s$ mesons within the heavy quark expansion (HQE), including the recently determined NNLO-QCD corrections to non-leptonic decays of the free $b$-quark. In addition, we update the HQE predictions for the lifetime ratios $\tau (B^+)/\tau (B_d)$ and $\tau (B_s)/\tau (B_d)$, and provide new results for the semileptonic branching fractions of the three mesons entirely within the HQE. We obtain a considerable improvement of the theoretical uncertainties, mostly due to the reduction of the renormalisation scale dependence when going from LO to NNLO, and for all the observables considered, we find good agreement, within uncertainties, between the HQE predictions and the corresponding experimental data. Our results read, respectively, $\Gamma (B^+) = 0.587^{+0.025}_{-0.035}~{\rm ps}^{-1}$, $\Gamma (B_d) = 0.636^{+0.028}_{-0.037}~{\rm ps}^{-1}$, $\Gamma (B_s) = 0.628^{+0.027}_{-0.035}~{\rm ps}^{-1}$, for the total decay widths, $\tau (B^+)/\tau (B_d) = 1.081^{+0.014}_{-0.016}$, $\tau (B_s)/\tau (B_d) = 1.013^{+0.007}_{-0.007}$, for the lifetime ratios, and ${\cal B}_{\rm sl} (B^+) = (11.46^{+0.47}_{-0.32}) \%$, ${\cal B}_{\rm sl} (B_d) = (10.57^{+0.47}_{-0.27}) \%$, ${\cal B}_{\rm sl} (B_s) = (10.52^{+0.50}_{-0.29}) \%$, for the semileptonic branching ratios. Finally, we also provide an outlook for further improvements of the HQE determinations of the $B$-meson decay widths and of their ratios.

We construct defects describing the transition between different phases of gauged linear sigma models with higher rank abelian gauge groups, as well as defects embedding these phases into the GLSMs. Our construction refers entirely to the sector protected by B-type supersymmetry, decoupling the gauge sector. It relies on an abstract characterization of such transition defects and does not involve an actual perturbative analysis. It turns out that the choices that are required to characterize consistent transition defects match with the homotopy classes of paths between different phases. Our method applies to non-anomalous as well as anomalous GLSMs, and we illustrate both cases with examples. This includes the GLSM associated to the resolution of the $A_N$ singularity and one describing the entire parameter space of $N = 2$ minimal models, in particular, the relevant flows between them. Via fusion with boundary conditions, the defects we construct yield functors describing the transport of D-branes on parameter space. We find that our results match with known results on D-brane transport.

Strongly lensed Type Ia supernovae (LSNe Ia) are a promising probe with which to measure the Hubble constant (H₀) directly. To use LSNe Ia for cosmography, a time-delay measurement between multiple images, a lens-mass model, and a mass reconstruction along the line of sight are required. In this work, we present the machine-learning network LSTM-FCNN, which is a combination of a long short-term memory network (LSTM) and a fully connected neural network (FCNN). The LSTM-FCNN is designed to measure time delays on a sample of LSNe Ia spanning a broad range of properties, which we expect to find with the upcoming Rubin Observatory Legacy Survey of Space and Time (LSST) and for which follow-up observations are planned. With follow-up observations in the i band (cadence of one to three days with a single-epoch 5σ depth of 24.5 mag), we reach a bias-free delay measurement with a precision of around 0.7 days over a large sample of LSNe Ia. The LSTM-FCNN is far more general than previous machine-learning approaches such as the random forest (RF) one, whereby an RF has to be trained for each observational pattern separately, and yet the LSTM-FCNN outperforms the RF by a factor of roughly three. Therefore, the LSTM-FCNN is a very promising approach to achieve robust time delays in LSNe Ia, which is important for a precise and accurate constraint on H₀.