We present cosmological constraints from the analysis of two-point correlation functions between galaxy positions and galaxy lensing measured in Dark Energy Survey (DES) Year 3 data and measurements of cosmic microwave background (CMB) lensing from the South Pole Telescope (SPT) and Planck. When jointly analyzing the DES-only two-point functions and the DES cross-correlations with SPT+Planck CMB lensing, we find $\Omega_{\rm m} = 0.344\pm 0.030$ and $S_8 \equiv \sigma_8 (\Omega_{\rm m}/0.3)^{0.5} = 0.773\pm 0.016$, assuming $\Lambda$CDM. When additionally combining with measurements of the CMB lensing autospectrum, we find $\Omega_{\rm m} = 0.306^{+0.018}_{-0.021}$ and $S_8 = 0.792\pm 0.012$. The high signal-to-noise of the CMB lensing cross-correlations enables several powerful consistency tests of these results, including comparisons with constraints derived from cross-correlations only, and comparisons designed to test the robustness of the galaxy lensing and clustering measurements from DES. Applying these tests to our measurements, we find no evidence of significant biases in the baseline cosmological constraints from the DES-only analyses or from the joint analyses with CMB lensing cross-correlations. However, the CMB lensing cross-correlations suggest possible problems with the correlation function measurements using alternative lens galaxy samples, in particular the redMaGiC galaxies and high-redshift MagLim galaxies, consistent with the findings of previous studies. We use the CMB lensing cross-correlations to identify directions for further investigating these problems.

The BV-Laplacian ∆ in quantum field theory is singular, by construction, but can be regularized by deforming the classical BV-action. Taking inspiration from string theory we describe a non-local deformation of the latter by adding stubs to the interaction vertices while keeping classical BV-invariance manifest. This is achieved using a version of homotopy transfer resulting in a non-polynomial action for which the quantum master equation is now well defined and will be satisfied by adding additional vertices at loop level. The latter can be defined with the help of standard regularization schemes and is independent of the definition of ∆. In particular, the determination of anomalies reduces to the standard text-book calculation. Finally, we describe how the deformed (quantum) action can be obtained as a canonical transformation. As an example, we illustrate this procedure for quantum electrodynamics.

We present a new approach to describe statistics of the non-linear matter density field that exploits a degeneracy in the impact of different cosmological parameters on the linear dimensionless matter power spectrum, $\Delta ^2_{\rm L}(k)$. We classify all cosmological parameters into two groups, shape parameters, which determine the shape of $\Delta ^2_{\rm L}(k)$, and evolution parameters, which only affect its amplitude at any given redshift. With this definition, the time evolution of $\Delta ^2_{\rm L}(k)$ in models with identical shape parameters but different evolution parameters can be mapped from one to the other by relabelling the redshifts that correspond to the same clustering amplitude, which we characterize by the linear mass fluctuation in spheres of radius 12 Mpc, σ₁₂(z). We use N-body simulations to show that the same evolution mapping relation gives a good description of the non-linear power spectrum, the halo mass function, or the full density field. The deviations from the exact degeneracy are the result of the different structure formation histories experienced by each model to reach the same clustering amplitude and can be accurately described in terms of differences in the suppression factor g(a) = D(a)/a. These relations can be used to drastically reduce the number of parameters required to describe the cosmology dependence of the power spectrum. We show how this can help to speed up the inference of parameter constraints from cosmological observations. We also present a new design of an emulator of the non-linear power spectrum whose predictions can be adapted to an arbitrary choice of evolution parameters and redshift.

We set out to determine stellar labels from low-resolution survey spectra of hot stars, specifically OBA stars with T_eff ≳ 7500 K. This fills a gap in the scientific analysis of large spectroscopic stellar surveys such as LAMOST, which offers spectra for millions of stars at R ~ 1800 and covers 3800 Å ≤ λ ≤ 9000 Å. We first explore the theoretical information content of such spectra to determine stellar labels via the Cramér-Rao bound. We show that in the limit of perfect model spectra and observed spectra with signal-to-noise ratio ~50-100, precise estimates are possible for a wide range of stellar labels: not only the effective temperature, T_eff, surface gravity, log g, and projected rotation velocity, vsin i, but also the micro-turbulence velocity,v_mic, helium abundance, N_He/N_tot, and the elemental abundances [C/H], [N/H], [O/H], [Si/H], [S/H], and [Fe/H]. Our analysis illustrates that the temperature regime of T_eff ~ 9500 K is challenging as the dominant Balmer and Paschen line strengths vary little with T_eff. We implement the simultaneous fitting of these 11 stellar labels to LAMOST hot-star spectra using the Payne approach, drawing on Kurucz's ATLAS12/SYNTHE local thermodynamic equilibrium spectra as the underlying models. We then obtain stellar parameter estimates for a sample of about 330 000 hot stars with LAMOST spectra, an increase by about two orders of magnitude in sample size. Among them, about 260 000 have good Gaia parallaxes (ω/σ_ω > 5), and their luminosities imply that ≳95% of them are luminous stars, mostly on the main sequence; the rest are evolved lower luminosity stars, such as hot subdwarfs and white dwarfs. We show that the fidelity of the results, particularly for the abundance estimates, is limited by the systematics of the underlying models as they do not account for nonlocal thermodynamic equilibrium effects. Finally, we show the detailed distribution of v_sin i of stars with 8000-15 000 K, illustrating that it extends to a sharp cutoff at the critical rotation velocity, v_crit, across a wide range of temperatures.

The catalog is only available at the CDS via anonymous ftp to cdsarc.u-strasbg.fr (ftp://130.79.128.5) or via http://cdsarc.u-strasbg.fr/viz-bin/cat/J/A+A/662/A66

We compute the two-loop mixed QCD-Electroweak corrections to q q ¯→ Hg and its crossed channels qg → Hq, q ¯g →H q ¯, limiting ourselves to the contribution of light virtual quarks. We compute the independent helicity amplitudes as well as the form factors for this process, expressing them in terms of hyperlogarithms with algebraic arguments. The Feynman integrals are computed by direct integration over Feynman parameters and the results are expressed in terms of a basis of rational prefactors.

We use stacked spectra of the host galaxies of photometrically identified type Ia supernovae (SNe Ia) from the Dark Energy Survey (DES) to search for correlations between Hubble diagram residuals and the spectral properties of the host galaxies. Utilising full spectrum fitting techniques on stacked spectra binned by Hubble residual, we find no evidence for trends between Hubble residuals and properties of the host galaxies that rely on spectral absorption features ($< 1.3{\sigma}$), such as stellar population age, metallicity, and mass-to-light ratio. However, we find significant trends between the Hubble residuals and the strengths of [OII] ($4.4{\sigma}$) and the Balmer emission lines ($3{\sigma}$). These trends are weaker than the well known trend between Hubble residuals and host galaxy stellar mass ($7.2{\sigma}$) that is derived from broad band photometry. After light curve corrections, we see fainter SNe Ia residing in galaxies with larger line strengths. We also find a trend ($3{\sigma}$) between Hubble residual and the Balmer decrement (a measure of reddening by dust) using $H{\beta}$ and $H{\gamma}$. The trend is only present in the redder SNe Ia, suggesting that bluer SNe Ia are relatively unaffected by dust in the interstellar medium of the host and that dust contributes to current Hubble diagram scatter impacting the measurement of cosmological parameters.

Finite density effects can destabilize the metastable vacua in relaxion models. Focusing on stars as nucleation seeds, we derive the conditions that lead to the formation and runaway of a relaxion bubble of a lower energy minimum than in vacuum. The resulting late-time phase transition in the universe allows us to set new constraints on the parameter space of relaxion models. We also find that similar instabilities can be triggered by the large electromagnetic fields around rotating neutron stars.

We use the small scales of the Dark Energy Survey (DES) Year-3 cosmic shear measurements, which are excluded from the DES Year-3 cosmological analysis, to constrain the baryonic feedback. To model the baryonic feedback, we adopt a baryonic correction model and use the numerical package \texttt{Baccoemu} to accelerate the evaluation of the baryonic nonlinear matter power spectrum. We design our analysis pipeline to focus on the constraints of the baryonic suppression effects, utilizing the implication given by a principal component analysis on the Fisher forecasts. Our constraint on the baryonic effects can then be used to better model and ameliorate the effects of baryons in producing cosmological constraints from the next generation large-scale structure surveys. We detect the baryonic suppression on the cosmic shear measurements with a $\sim 2 \sigma$ significance. The characteristic halo mass for which half of the gas is ejected by baryonic feedback is constrained to be $M_c > 10^{13.2} h^{-1} M_{\odot}$ (95% C.L.). The best-fit baryonic suppression is $\sim 5\%$ at $k=1.0 {\rm Mpc}\ h^{-1}$ and $\sim 15\%$ at $k=5.0 {\rm Mpc} \ h^{-1}$. Our findings are robust with respect to the assumptions about the cosmological parameters, specifics of the baryonic model, and intrinsic alignments.

In this white paper for the Snowmass process, we review the status and prospects of the field of rare decays of b and c hadrons. The role that rare decays play in the search for physics beyond the Standard Model is emphasised. We stress the complementarity of a large set of relevant processes and outline the most promising directions. The experimental opportunities at Belle II, BES III, ATLAS, CMS, LHCb, and at future machines are discussed. We also summarize the challenges that need to be addressed on the theory side to achieve theory uncertainties for rare decays that match the expected experimental sensitivities.

Cosmological analyses with type Ia supernovae (SNe Ia) often assume a single empirical relation between color and luminosity ($\beta$) and do not account for varying host-galaxy dust properties. However, from studies of dust in large samples of galaxies, it is known that dust attenuation can vary significantly. Here we take advantage of state-of-the-art modeling of galaxy properties to characterize dust parameters (dust attenuation $A_V$, and a parameter describing the dust law slope $R_V$) for the Dark Energy Survey (DES) SN Ia host galaxies using the publicly available \texttt{BAGPIPES} code. Utilizing optical and infrared data of the hosts alone, we find three key aspects of host dust that impact SN Ia cosmology: 1) there exists a large range ($\sim1-6$) of host $R_V$ 2) high stellar mass hosts have $R_V$ on average $\sim0.7$ lower than that of low-mass hosts 3) there is a significant ($>3\sigma$) correlation between the Hubble diagram residuals of red SNe Ia that when corrected for reduces scatter by $\sim13\%$ and the significance of the ``mass step'' to $\sim1\sigma$. These represent independent confirmations of recent predictions based on dust that attempted to explain the puzzling ``mass step'' and intrinsic scatter ($\sigma_{\rm int}$) in SN Ia analyses. We also find that red-sequence galaxies have both lower and more peaked dust law slope distributions on average in comparison to non red-sequence galaxies. We find that the SN Ia $\beta$ and $\sigma_{\rm int}$ both differ by $>3\sigma$ when determined separately for red-sequence galaxy and all other galaxy hosts. The agreement between fitted host-$R_V$ and SN Ia $\beta$&$\sigma_{\rm int}$ suggests that host dust properties play a major role in SN Ia color-luminosity standardization and supports the claim that SN Ia intrinsic scatter is driven by $R_V$ variation.

Thermal electrons cannot directly participate in the process of diffusive acceleration at electron-ion shocks because their Larmor radii are smaller than the shock transition width: this is the well-known electron injection problem of diffusive shock acceleration. Instead, an efficient pre-acceleration process must exist that scatters electrons off of electromagnetic fluctuations on scales much shorter than the ion gyroradius. The recently found intermediate-scale instability provides a natural way to produce such fluctuations in parallel shocks. The instability drives comoving (with the upstream plasma) ion-cyclotron waves at the shock front and only operates when the drift speed is smaller than half of the electron Alfvén speed. Here we perform particle-in-cell simulations with the SHARP code to study the impact of this instability on electron acceleration at parallel nonrelativistic, electron-ion shocks. To this end, we compare a shock simulation in which the intermediate-scale instability is expected to grow to simulations where it is suppressed. In particular, the simulation with an Alfvénic Mach number large enough to quench the intermediate instability shows a great reduction (by two orders of magnitude) of the electron acceleration efficiency. Moreover, the simulation with a reduced ion-to-electron mass ratio (where the intermediate instability is also suppressed) not only artificially precludes electron acceleration but also results in erroneous electron and ion heating in the downstream and shock transition regions. This finding opens up a promising route for a plasma physical understanding of diffusive shock acceleration of electrons, which necessarily requires realistic mass ratios in simulations of collisionless electron-ion shocks.

(Abridged) Long Gamma-Ray Bursts (GRBs) offer a promising tool to trace the cosmic history of star formation, especially at high redshift where conventional methods are known to suffer from intrinsic biases. Previous studies of GRB host galaxies at low redshift showed that high surface densities of stellar mass and star formation rate (SFR) can potentially enhance the GRB production. We assess how the size, the stellar mass and SFR surface densities of distant galaxies affect their probability to host a long GRB, using a sample of GRB hosts at $z > 1$ and a control sample of star-forming sources from the field. We gather a sample of 45 GRB host galaxies at $1 < z < 3.1$ observed with the Hubble Space Telescope WFC3 camera in the near-infrared. Using the GALFIT parametric approach, we model the GRB host light profile and derive the half-light radius for 35 GRB hosts, which we use to estimate the SFR and stellar mass surface densities of each object. We compare the distribution of these physical quantities to the SFR-weighted properties of a complete sample of star-forming galaxies from the 3D-HST deep survey at comparable redshift and stellar mass. We show that, similarly to $z < 1$, GRB hosts are smaller in size and they have higher stellar mass and SFR surface densities than field galaxies at $1 < z < 2$. Interestingly, this result is robust even when considering separately the hosts of GRBs with optically-bright afterglows and the hosts of dark GRBs. At $z > 2$ though, GRB hosts appear to have sizes and stellar mass surface densities more consistent with those characterizing the field galaxies. In addition to a possible trend toward low metallicity environment, other environmental properties such as stellar density appears to play a role in the formation of long GRBs, at least up to $z \sim 2$. This might suggest that GRBs require special environments to be produced.

Polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs) play a key role in the chemical and hydrodynamical evolution of the atmospheres of exoplanets and planet-forming discs. If they can survive the planet formation process, PAHs are likely to be involved in pre-biotic chemical reactions eventually leading to more complex molecules such as amino acids and nucleotides, which form the basis for life as we know it. However, the abundance and specific role of PAHs in these environments is largely unknown due to limitations in sensitivity and range of wavelength of current and previous space-borne facilities. Upcoming infrared space spectroscopy missions, such as Twinkle and Ariel, present a unique opportunity to detect PAHs in the atmospheres of exoplanets and planet-forming discs. In this work, we present synthetic observations based on conservative numerical modelling of typical planet-forming discs and a transiting hot Saturnian planet around solar-type star. Our models show that Twinkle and Ariel might both be able to detect the 3.3 $\mu$m PAH feature within reasonable observing time in discs and transiting planets, assuming that PAHs are present with an abundance of at least one-tenth of the interstellar medium value.

We present direct N-body simulations, carried out with NBODY6+ + GPU, of young and compact low-metallicity (Z = 0.0002) star clusters with 1.1 × 10⁵ stars, a velocity dispersion of ~15 $\mathrm{km\, s^{-1}}$, a half-mass radius R_h = 0.6 pc, and a binary fraction of $10{{\ \rm per\,cent}}$ including updated evolution models for stellar winds and (pulsation) pair-instability supernovae (PSNe). Within the first tens of megayears, each cluster hosts several black hole (BH) merger events which nearly cover the complete mass range of primary and secondary BH masses for current LIGO-Virgo-KAGRA gravitational wave detections. The importance of gravitational recoil is estimated statistically during post-processing analysis. We present possible formation paths of massive BHs above the assumed lower PSN mass-gap limit ($45\, {\rm M}_\odot$) into the intermediate-mass black hole (IMBH) regime ($\gt 100\, {\rm M}_\odot$) which include collisions of stars, BHs, and the direct collapse of stellar merger remnants with low core masses. The stellar evolution updates result in the early formation of heavier stellar BHs compared to the previous model. The resulting higher collision rates with massive stars support the rapid formation of massive BHs. For models assuming a high accretion efficiency for star-BH mergers, we present a first-generation formation scenario for GW190521-like events: a merger of two BHs which reached the PSN mass-gap merging with massive stars. This event is independent of gravitational recoil and therefore conceivable in dense stellar systems with low escape velocities. One simulated cluster even forms an IMBH binary (153, 173 M_⊙) which is expected to merge within a Hubble time.

We use high-precision combined strong/weak lensing and kinematics measurements of the total mass profiles of the observed galaxy clusters MACS J1206.2-0847 and Abell S1063, to constrain the relativistic sector of the general DHOST dark energy theories, which exhibit a partial breaking of the so called Vainsthein screening mechanism, on the linear level of scalar fluctuations around a cosmological background. In particular, by using the MG-MAMMPOSST framework developed in Pizzuti et al., for the kinematics analysis of member galaxies in clusters, along with lensing mass profile reconstructions, we provide new constraints on the coupling Y₂ that governs the theory's relativistic contribution to the lensing potential. The new bound from the combination of kinematics and lensing measurements of MACS 1206, $Y_2=-0.12^{+0.66}_{-0.67}$ at 2σ, provides about a two-fold improvement on previous constraints. In the case of Abell S1063, a >2σ tension with the GR expectation arises. We discuss this in some detail, and we investigate the possible sources of systematics that can explain the tension. We further discuss why the combination of kinematics of member galaxies with lensing is capable of providing much tighter bounds compared to kinematics or lensing alone, and we explain how the number density profile of tracers, as well as the choice of the velocity anisotropy profile, affects the final results.

We investigate the final collapse of rotating and non-rotating pulsational pair-instability supernova progenitors with zero-age-main-sequence masses of 60, 80, and 115 M_⊙ and iron cores between 2.37 and 2.72 M_⊙ by 2D hydrodynamics simulations. Using the general relativistic NADA-FLD code with energy-dependent three-flavour neutrino transport by flux-limited diffusion allows us to follow the evolution beyond the moment when the transiently forming neutron star (NS) collapses to a black hole (BH), which happens within 350-580 ms after bounce in all cases. Because of high neutrino luminosities and mean energies, neutrino heating leads to shock revival within ≲ 250 ms post bounce in all cases except the rapidly rotating 60 M_⊙ model. In the latter case, centrifugal effects support a 10 per cent higher NS mass but reduce the radiated neutrino luminosities and mean energies by ~20 per cent and ~10 per cent, respectively, and the neutrino-heating rate by roughly a factor of two compared to the non-rotating counterpart. After BH formation, the neutrino luminosities drop steeply but continue on a 1-2 orders of magnitude lower level for several 100 ms because of aspherical accretion of neutrino and shock-heated matter, before the ultimately spherical collapse of the outer progenitor shells suppresses the neutrino emission to negligible values. In all shock-reviving models BH accretion swallows the entire neutrino-heated matter and the explosion energies decrease from maxima around 1.5 × 10⁵¹ erg to zero within a few seconds latest. Nevertheless, the shock or a sonic pulse moves outward and may trigger mass-loss, which we estimate by long-time simulations with the PROMETHEUS code. We also provide gravitational-wave signals.

SN 2018hti was a very nearby (z=0.0614) superluminous supernova with an exceedingly bright absolute magnitude of -21.7 mag in r-band at maximum. The densely sampled pre-maximum light curves of SN 2018hti show a slow luminosity evolution and constrain the rise time to ~50 rest-frame days. We fitted synthetic light curves to the photometry to infer the physical parameters of the explosion of SN 2018hti for both the magnetar and the CSM-interaction scenarios. We conclude that one of two mechanisms could be powering the luminosity of SN 2018hti; interaction with ~10 Msun of circumstellar material or a magnetar with a magnetic field of B_p~1.3e13 G and initial period of P_spin~1.8 ms. From the nebular spectrum modelling we infer that SN 2018hti likely results from the explosion of a ~40 Msun progenitor star.

We explicitly carry out the symplectic quantization of a family of multifield generalized Proca (GP) electrodynamics theories. In the process, we provide an independent derivation of the so-called secondary constraint enforcing relations—consistency conditions that significantly restrict the allowed interactions in multifield settings already at the classical level. Additionally, we unveil the existence of quantum consistency conditions, which apply in both single- and multifield GP scenarios. Our newly found conditions imply that not all classically well-defined (multi-)GP theories are amenable to quantization. The extension of our results to the most general multi-GP class is conceptually straightforward, albeit algebraically cumbersome.

We evaluate the leading-order hadronic vacuum polarization contribution to the anomalous magnetic moment of the muon with two light flavors in minimal hard-wall and soft-wall holographic QCD models, as well as in simple generalizations thereof, and compare it to the rather precise results available from dispersive and lattice approaches. While holographic QCD cannot be expected to shed light on the existing small discrepancies between the latter, this comparison in turn provides useful information on the holographic models, which have been used to evaluate hadronic light-by-light contributions where errors in data-driven and lattice approaches are more sizable. In particular, in the hard-wall model that has recently been used to implement the Melnikov-Vainshtein short-distance constraint on hadronic light-by-light contributions, a matching of the hadronic vacuum polarization to the data-driven approach points to the same correction of parameters that has been proposed recently in order to account for next-to-leading-order effects.

The scale-dependent bias effect on the galaxy power spectrum is a very promising probe of the local primordial non-Gaussianity (PNG) parameter $f_{\rm NL}$, but the amplitude of the effect is proportional to $f_{\rm NL}b_{\phi}$, where $b_{\phi}$ is the linear PNG galaxy bias parameter. Our knowledge of $b_{\phi}$ is currently very limited, yet nearly all existing $f_{\rm NL}$ constraints and forecasts assume precise knowledge for it. Here, we use the BOSS DR12 galaxy power spectrum to illustrate how our uncertain knowledge of $b_{\phi}$ currently prevents us from constraining $f_{\rm NL}$ with a given statistical precision $\sigma_{f_{\rm NL}}$. Assuming different fixed choices for the relation between $b_{\phi}$ and the linear density bias $b_1$, we find that $\sigma_{f_{\rm NL}}$ can vary by as much as an order of magnitude. Our strongest bound is $f_{\rm NL} = 16 \pm 16\ (1\sigma)$, while the loosest is $f_{\rm NL} = 230 \pm 226\ (1\sigma)$ for the same BOSS data. The impact of $b_{\phi}$ can be especially pronounced because it can be close to zero. We also show how marginalizing over $b_{\phi}$ with wide priors is not conservative, and leads in fact to biased constraints through parameter space projection effects. Independently of galaxy bias assumptions, the scale-dependent bias effect can only be used to detect $f_{\rm NL} \neq 0$ by constraining the product $f_{\rm NL}b_{\phi}$, but the error bar $\sigma_{f_{\rm NL}}$ remains undetermined and the results cannot be compared with the CMB; we find $f_{\rm NL}b_{\phi} \neq 0$ with $1.6\sigma$ significance. We also comment on why these issues are important for analyses with the galaxy bispectrum. Our results strongly motivate simulation-based research programs aimed at robust theoretical priors for the $b_{\phi}$ parameter, without which we may never be able to competitively constrain $f_{\rm NL}$ using galaxy data.

High-precision measurements require optimal setups and analysis tools to achieve continuous improvements. Systematic corrections need to be modeled with high accuracy and known uncertainty to reconstruct underlying physical phenomena. To this end, we present Gaussian processes for modeling experiments and usage with Bayesian optimization, on the example of an electron energy detector, achieving optimal performance. We demonstrate the method's strengths and outline stochastic variational Gaussian processes for physics applications with large data sets, enabling new solutions for current problems.

The current cosmological model requires new physics beyond the standard model of elementary particles and fields, such as dark matter and dark energy. Their nature is unknown and so is that of the initial fluctuations in the early Universe that led to the creation of the cosmic structure we see today. Polarized light of the cosmic microwave background (CMB) may hold the answer to these fundamental questions. Here, I discuss two phenomena that could be uncovered in CMB observations. First, if the physics behind dark matter and dark energy violates parity symmetry, their coupling to photons should have rotated the plane of linear polarization as the CMB photons have been travelling for more than 13 billion years. This effect is known as `cosmic birefringence'. A tantalizing hint of such a signal has been found with a statistical significance of 3σ. Second, the period of accelerated expansion in the very early Universe, called `cosmic inflation', might have produced a stochastic background of primordial gravitational waves (as yet unobserved). These might have been generated by vacuum fluctuations in spacetime or by matter fields and could be measurable in the CMB polarization. The goal of observing these two phenomena will influence how data from future CMB experiments are collected, calibrated and analysed.

This summary reviews contributions to the CKM 2021 workshop in Working Group 4. In particular, theoretical and experimental progress in determining $B$ meson mixing properties are discussed.

We study the effects of a fixed de Sitter geometry background in scenarios of false vacuum decay. It is currently understood that bubble nucleation processes associated with first order phase transitions are particularly important in cosmology. The geometry of spacetime complicates the interpretation of the decay rate of a metastable vacuum. However, the effects of curvature can still be studied in the particular case where backreaction is neglected. We compute the imaginary part of the action in de Sitter space, including the one-loop and the gradient corrections. We use two independent methodologies and quantify the size of the corrections without any assumptions on the thickness of the wall of the scalar background configuration.

While $CP$ violation has never been observed in the strong interactions, the QCD Lagrangian admits a $CP$-odd topological interaction proportional to the so called $\theta$ angle, which weighs the contributions to the partition function from different topological sectors. The observational bounds are usually interpreted as demanding a severe tuning of $\theta$ against the phases of the quark masses, which constitutes the strong $CP$ problem. Here we report on recent challenges to this view based on a careful treatment of boundary conditions in the path integral and of the limit of infinite spacetime volume, which leads to $\theta$ dropping out of fermion correlation functions and becoming unobservable, implying that $CP$ is preserved in QCD.

We revisit the joint constraints in the mixed hot dark matter scenario in which both thermally produced QCD axions and relic neutrinos are present. Upon recomputing the cosmological axion abundance via recent advances in the literature, we improve the state-of-the-art analyses and provide updated bounds on axion and neutrino masses. By avoiding approximate methods, such as the instantaneous decoupling approximation, and limitations due to the limited validity of the perturbative approach in QCD that forced to artificially divide the constraints from the axion-pion and the axion-gluon production channels, we find robust and self-consistent limits. We investigate the two most popular axion frameworks: KSVZ and DFSZ. From Big Bang Nucleosynthesis (BBN) light element abundances data we find for the KSVZ axion $\Delta N_{\rm eff}<0.31$ and an axion mass bound $m_a < 0.53 $ eV (i.e., a bound on the axion decay constant $f_a > 1.07 \times 10^7$ GeV) both at $95\%$ CL. These BBN bounds are improved to $\Delta N_{\rm eff}<0.14$ and $m_a< 0.16$ eV ($f_a > 3.56 \times 10^7$ GeV) if a prior on the baryon energy density from Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) data is assumed. When instead considering cosmological observations from the CMB temperature, polarization and lensing from the Planck satellite combined with large scale structure data we find $\Delta N_{\rm eff}<0.23$, $m_a< 0.28$ eV ($f_a > 2.02 \times 10^7$ GeV) and $\sum m_\nu < 0.16$ eV at $95\%$ CL. This corresponds approximately to a factor of $5$ improvement in the axion mass bound with respect to the existing limits. Very similar results are obtained for the DFSZ axion. We also forecast upcoming observations from future CMB and galaxy surveys, showing that they could reach percent level errors for $m_a\sim 1$ eV.

The Standard Model of particle physics covers only about 5% of the energy density of the Universe. The remaining components, Dark Matter (DM) and Dark Energy, are largely unknown. The Λ Cold Dark Matter (ΛCDM) cosmological model, postulating DM which is collisionless and non-relativistic before matter-radiation equality, is extremely successful at explaining astronomical observations at large scales; however, its predictive power fails at small (kiloparsecs) scales. In this work, three modifications of the ΛCDM model are presented which resolve the discrepancies between observations and predictions at small scales. Their common features are: a late kinetic decoupling

between the DM particles and a relativistic scattering partner, suppressing the DM power spectrum at small scales, and the introduction of self-interactions, increasing the entropy transfer between DM regions. The first model consists of a completely secluded Dark Sector with a U(1) gauge symmetry and multiple generations of fermions. The second one includes the option of a coupling between DM and neutrinos, which serve as relativistic scattering partners. The third model features a DM annihilation channel into electrons and positrons.

Irreversibility is inherent to life and all nonequilibrium processes. From a physical perspective this irreversibility has been proved to be tightly related to the entropy production, energy dissipation, and the structure of nonequilibrium fluctuations. However, we are still building our understanding of how the performance of the vital biological processes hinges upon the level of energy consumption. Similarly, it is a puzzle how the irreversibility generated by energy dissipation at the microscopic level propagates across different length scales, all the way up to our macroscopic world. Given their important role, irreversibility and dissipation have been sought after and multiple techniques and measures have been introduced to detect and quantify them.

Three-dimensional correlations of the Lyman-$\alpha$ (Ly$\alpha$) forest and cross correlations between the Ly$\alpha$ forest and quasars have been measured on large scales, allowing a precise measurement of the baryon acoustic oscillation (BAO) feature at redshifts $z>2$. These 3D correlations are often modelled using linear perturbation theory, but full-shape analyses to extract cosmological information beyond BAO will require more realistic models capable of describing non-linearities present at smaller scales. We present a measurement of the Ly$\alpha$ forest flux power spectrum from large hydrodynamic simulations -- the Sherwood simulations -- and compare it to different models describing the small-scale deviations from linear theory. We confirm that the model presented in Arinyo-i-Prats et al. (2015) fits the measured 3D power up to $k=10\, h\rm{Mpc^{-1}}$ with an accuracy better than 5%, and show that the same model can also describe the 1D correlations with similar precision. We also present, for the first time, an equivalent study for the cross-power spectrum of halos with the Ly$\alpha$ forest, and we discuss different challenges we face when modelling the cross-power spectrum beyond linear scales. We make all our measured power spectra public in \url{https://github.com/andreufont/sherwood_p3d}. This study is a step towards joint analyses of 1D and 3D flux correlations, and towards using the quasar-Ly$\alpha$ cross-correlation beyond BAO analyses.

Based on the Simplified Differential Equations approach, we present results for the two-loop non-planar hexa-box families of master integrals. We introduce a new approach to obtain the boundary terms and establish a one-dimensional integral representation of the master integrals in terms of Generalised Polylogarithms, when the alphabet contains non-factorisable square roots. The results are relevant to the study of NNLO QCD corrections for W, Z and Higgs-boson production in association with two hadronic jets.

In this decade one expects a very significant progress in measuring the branching ratios for several rare $K$ and $B$ decays, in particular for the decays $K^+\to\pi^+\nu\bar\nu$, $K_L\to\pi^0\nu\bar\nu$, $B_s\to\mu^+\mu^+$ and $B_d\to\mu^+\mu^+$. On the theory side a very significant progress on calculating these branching ratios has been achieved in the last thirty years culminating recently in rather precise SM predictions for them. It is then unfortunate that some papers still cite the results for $K^+\to\pi^+\nu\bar\nu$ and $K_L\to\pi^0\nu\bar\nu$ presented by us in 2015. They are clearly out of date. Similar comments apply to predictions for $B_{s,d}\to\mu^+\mu^-$. In this note I want to stress again that, in view of the tensions between various determinations of $V_{cb}$ in tree-level decays, presently, the only trustable SM predictions for the branching ratios in question can be obtained by eliminating their dependence on the CKM parameters with the help of $|\varepsilon_K|$, $\Delta M_s$, $\Delta M_d$ and $S_{\psi K_S}$, evaluated in the SM. In this context I am astonished by statements made by some computer code practitioners that setting in this strategy these four $\Delta F=2$ observables to their experimental values is an assumption. The goal of this strategy is not to make an overall SM fit but to predict the SM branching ratios. In the SM there are no new physics (NP) contributions to $\Delta F=2$ transitions and no assumption on the absence of NP is needed. Moreover, presently NP is not required to describe simultaneously the very precise data on $|\varepsilon_K|$, $\Delta M_s$, $\Delta M_d$ and $S_{\psi K_S}$. This strategy for obtaining true SM predictions for rare decay branching ratios is moreover not polluted by hadronic uncertainies and observed anomalies in semi-leptonic decays used often in global analyses.

We study gravothermal evolution of dark matter halos in the presence of differential self-scattering that has strong velocity and angular dependencies. We design controlled N-body simulations to model Rutherford and Moller scatterings in the halo, and follow its evolution in both core-expansion and -collapse phases. The simulations show the commonly-used transfer cross section underestimates the effects of dark matter self-interactions, but the viscosity cross section provides a good approximation for modeling angular-dependent dark matter scattering. We investigate thermodynamic properties of the halo, and find that the three moments of the Boltzmann equation under the fluid approximation are satisfied. We further propose a constant effective cross section, which integrates over the halo's characteristic velocity dispersion with weighting kernels motivated by kinetic theory of heat conduction. The effective cross section provides an approximation to differential self-scattering for most of the halo evolution. However, it can significantly underestimate the growth rate of the central density at late stages of the collapse phase. This indicates that constant and velocity-dependent dark matter self-interactions are fundamentally different, as for the latter the cross section evolves with the halo dynamically, boosting the collapse. This feature may help test different self-interacting dark matter models.

We perform the first calculation of form factors in the semileptonic decays B → D₁(2420)ℓν_ℓ and B → D₁^'(2430)ℓν_ℓ using QCD light-cone sum rules (LCSRs) with B-meson distribution amplitudes. In this calculation the c-quark mass is finite. Analytical expressions for two-particle contributions up to twist four are obtained. To disentangle the D₁ and D₁^' contributions in the LCSRs, we suggest a novel approach that introduces a combination of two interpolating currents for these charmed mesons. To fix all the parameters in the LCSRs, we use the two-point QCD sum rules for the decay constants of D₁ and D₁^' mesons augmented by a single experimental input, that is the B → D₁(2420)ℓν_ℓ decay width. We provide numerical results for all B → D₁ and B → D₁^' form factors. As a byproduct, we also obtain the D₁- and D₁^'-meson decay constants and predict the lepton-flavour universality ratios R(D₁) and R(D₁^').

We study gauge theories of background fields associated to BRST quantized spinning particle models and identify background-independent algebraic structures which allow to systematically reduce the spectrum of fields and subject some of them to dynamical equations of motion. More specifically, we construct a manifestly background-independent extension of the model based on N = 2 spinning particle. The resulting system describes an on-shell spin-1 field coupled to off-shell background fields including metric and dilaton. Tensoring with a given Lie algebra results in a non-abelian extension of the model.

Proteins control many vital functions in living cells, such as cell growth and cell division. Reliable coordination of these functions requires the spatial and temporal organization of proteins inside cells, which encodes information about the cell's geometry and the cell-cycle stage. The study of such protein patterns has long focused around formation in uniform environments. However, in recent years, it has become evident that spatial heterogeneities are essential for protein patterning, and various guiding cues in the cell or at the cell boundary can be exploited to reliably control protein pattern formation. We review how protein patterns are guided by cell size and shape, by other protein patterns that act as templates, and by the mechanical properties of the cell. The basic mechanisms of guided pattern formation are elucidated with reference to observations in various biological model organisms. We posit that understanding the controlled formation of protein patterns in cells will be an essential part of understanding information processing in living systems.

Context. Galaxy clusters grow through mergers and the accretion of substructures along large-scale filaments. Many of the missing baryons in the local Universe may reside in such filaments as the warm-hot intergalactic medium (WHIM).
Aims: SRG/eROSITA performance verification observations revealed that the binary cluster Abell 3391/3395 and the Northern Clump (the MCXC J0621.7-5242 galaxy cluster) are aligning along a cosmic filament in soft X-rays, similarly to what has been seen in simulations before. We aim to understand the dynamical state of the Northern Clump as it enters the atmosphere (3 × R₂₀₀) of Abell 3391.
Methods: We analyzed joint eROSITA, XMM-Newton, and Chandra observations to probe the morphological, thermal, and chemical properties of the Northern Clump from its center out to a radius of 988 kpc (R₂₀₀). We utilized the ASKAP/EMU radio data, the DECam optical image, and the Planck y-map to study the influence of the wide-angle tail (WAT) radio source on the Northern Clump's central intracluster medium. Using eROSITA data, we also analyzed the gas properties of the Northern Filament, the region between the virial radii of the Northern Clump and the A3391 cluster. From the Magneticum simulation, we identified an analog of the A3391/95 system along with an infalling group resembling the Northern Clump.
Results: The Northern Clump is a weak cool-core cluster centered on a WAT radio galaxy. The gas temperature over 0.2-0.5R₅₀₀ is k_BT₅₀₀ = 1.99 ± 0.04 keV. We employed the mass-temperature (M - T) scaling relation and obtained a mass estimate of M₅₀₀ = (7.68 ± 0.43) × 10¹³ M_⊙ and R₅₀₀ = (63 6 ± 12) kpc. Its X-ray atmosphere has a boxy shape and deviates from spherical symmetry. We identify a southern surface brightness edge, likely caused by subsonic motion relative to the filament gas in the southern direction. At ~R₅₀₀, the southern atmosphere (infalling head) appears to be 42% hotter than its northern atmosphere. We detect a downstream tail pointing toward the north with a projected length of ~318 kpc, plausibly the result of ram pressure stripping. Through a two-temperature fit, we identify a cooler component in the Northern Filament with k_BT = 0.68_{- 0.64}^{+ 0.38} keV <!--inline-formula id="FI1"><alternatives><![CDATA[{k_{B}}T = 0.68_{- 0.64}^{+ 0.38}{{keV}}]]>kBT=0.68−0.64+0.38keV<inline-graphic xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink" id="img_eq1" mime-subtype="png" mimetype="image" xlink:href="aa41415-21-eq1.png"/></alternatives> and n_e = 1.99_-1.24^+0.88 × 10^-5cm^-3, <!--inline-formula id="FI2"><alternatives><![CDATA[{n_e}1.99_{- 1.24}^{+ 0.88} × {10^{- 5}}{{c}}{{{m}}^{- 3}}]]>ne1.99−1.24+0.88×10−5cm−3<inline-graphic xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink" id="img_eq2" mime-subtype="png" mimetype="image" xlink:href="aa41415-21-eq2.png"/></alternatives> which are consistent within the expected ranges of WHIM properties. The analog group in the Magneticum simulation is experiencing changes in its gas properties and a shift between the position of the halo center and that of the bound gas, while approaching the main cluster pair.
Conclusions: The Northern Clump is a dynamically active system and far from being relaxed. Its atmosphere is affected by an interaction with the WAT and by gas sloshing or its infall toward Abell 3391 along the filament, consistent with the analog group-size halo in the Magneticum simulation.

The coming generation of galaxy surveys will provide measurements of galaxy clustering with unprecedented accuracy and data size, which will allow us to test cosmological models at much higher precision than achievable previously. This means that we must have more accurate theoretical predictions to compare with future observational data. As a first step towards more accurate modelling of the redshift space distortions (RSD) of small-scale galaxy clustering in modified gravity (MG) cosmologies, we investigate the validity of the so-called Skew-T (ST) probability distribution function (PDF) of halo pairwise peculiar velocities in these models. We show that, combined with the streaming model of RSD, the ST PDF substantially improves the small-scale predictions by incorporating skewness and kurtosis, for both ΛCDM and two leading MG models: f(R) gravity and the DGP braneworld model. The ST model reproduces the velocity PDF and redshift-space halo clustering measured from MG N-body simulations very well down to ~5 h^-1Mpc. In particular, we investigate the enhancements of halo pairwise velocity moments with respect to ΛCDM for a larger range of MG variants than previous works, and present simple explanations to the behaviours observed. By performing a simple Fisher analysis, we find a significnat increase in constraining power to detect modifications of General Relativity by introducing small-scale information in the RSD analyses.

We present the first results with the ROentgen Survey with an Imaging Telescope Array (eROSITA) on board the Russian Spektrum-Roentgen-Gamma mission, and we combine the new X-ray data with observations with the Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS). We used the SUPERBLINK proper motion catalog of nearby M dwarfs as input sample to search for eROSITA and TESS data. We extracted Gaia DR2 data for the full M dwarf catalog, which comprises ~9000 stars, and we calculated the stellar parameters from empirical relations with optical/IR colors. Then we cross-matched this catalog with the eROSITA Final Equatorial Depth Survey (eFEDS) and the first eROSITA all-sky survey (eRASS1). After a meticulous source identification in which we associated the closest Gaia source with the eROSITA X-ray detections, our sample of M dwarfs is defined by 687 stars with SpT = K5..M7 (673 from eRASS1 and 14 from eFEDS). While for eRASSl we used the data from the source catalog provided by the eROSITA_DE consortium, for the much smaller eFEDS sample, we performed the data extraction, and we analyzed the X-ray spectra and light curves. This unprecedented data base for X-ray emitting M dwarfs allowed us to place a quantitative constraint on the mass dependence of the X-ray luminosity, and to determine the change in the activity level with respect to pre-main-sequence stars. TESS observations are available for 489 of 687 X-ray detected M dwarfs. By applying standard period search methods, we were able to determine the rotation period for 180 X-ray detected M dwarfs. This is about one-forth of the X-ray sample. With the joint eROSITA and TESS sample, and combining it with our compilation of historical X-ray and rotation data for M dwarfs, we examined the mass dependence of the saturated regime of the rotation-activity relation. A first comparison of eROSITA hardness ratios and spectra shows that 65% of the X-ray detected M dwarfs have coronal temperatures of ~0.5 keV. We performed a statistical investigation of the long-term X-ray variability of M dwarfs by comparing the eROSITA measurements to those obtained ~30 yr earlier during the ROSAT all-sky survey (RASS). Evidence for X-ray flares is found in various parts of our analysis: directly from an inspection of the eFEDS light curves, in the relation between RASS and eRASSl X-ray luminosities, and in a subset of stars that displays hotter X-ray emission than the bulk of the sample according to the hardness ratios. Finally, we point out the need to obtain X-ray spectroscopy for more M dwarfs to study the coronal temperature-luminosity relation, which is not well constrained by our eFEDS results.

Full Tables 2, 3 and 5 are only available at the CDS via anonymous ftp to cdsarc.u-strasbg.fr (ftp://130.79.128.5) or via http://cdsarc.u-strasbg.fr/viz-bin/cat/J/A+A/661/A29

Recent subarcsecond resolution surveys of the dust continuum emission from nearby protoplanetary disks show a strong correlation between the sizes and luminosities of the disks. We aim to explain the origin of the (sub-)millimeter size-luminosity relation (SLR) between the 68% effective radius (r_eff) of disks with their continuum luminosity (L_mm), with models of gas and dust evolution in a simple viscous accretion disk and radiative transfer calculations. We use a large grid of models (10⁵ simulations) with and without planetary gaps, and vary the initial conditions of the key parameters. We calculate the disk continuum emission and the effective radius for all models as a function of time. By selecting those simulations that continuously follow the SLR, we can derive constraints on the input parameters of the models. We confirm previous results that models of smooth disks in the radial drift regime are compatible with the observed SLR (L_mm ∝ r_eff²), but only smooth disks cannot be the reality. We show that the SLR is more widely populated if planets are present. However, they tend to follow a different relation than smooth disks, potentially implying that a mixture of smooth and substructured disks are present in the observed sample. We derive a SLR (L_mm ∝ r_eff^5/4) for disks with strong substructure. To be compatible with the SLR, models need to have an initially high disk mass (≥2.5 × 10⁻² M_*) and low turbulence-parameter a values (≤10⁻³). Furthermore, we find that the grain composition and porosity drastically affects the evolution of disks in the size-luminosity diagram where relatively compact grains that include amorphous carbon are favored. Moreover, a uniformly optically thick disk with high albedo (0.9) that follows the SLR cannot be formed from an evolutionary procedure.

While protoplanetary disks are often treated as isolated systems in planet formation models, observations increasingly suggest that vigorous interactions between Class II disks and their environments are not rare. DO Tau is a T Tauri star that has previously been hypothesized to have undergone a close encounter with the HV Tau system. As part of the DESTINYS ESO Large Programme, we present new Very Large Telescope (VLT)/SPHERE polarimetric observations of DO Tau and combine them with archival Hubble Space Telescope (HST) scattered-light images and Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) observations of CO isotopologues and CS to map a network of complex structures. The SPHERE and ALMA observations show that the circumstellar disk is connected to arms extending out to several hundred astronomical units. HST and ALMA also reveal stream-like structures northeast of DO Tau, some of which are at least several thousand astronomical units long. These streams appear not to be gravitationally bound to DO Tau, and comparisons with previous Herschel far-IR observations suggest that the streams are part of a bridge-like structure connecting DO Tau and HV Tau. We also detect a fainter redshifted counterpart to a previously known blueshifted CO outflow. While some of DO Tau's complex structures could be attributed to a recent disk-disk encounter, they might be explained alternatively by interactions with remnant material from the star formation process. These panchromatic observations of DO Tau highlight the need to contextualize the evolution of Class II disks by examining processes occurring over a wide range of size scales.

Ultra-hot Jupiters (UHJs) are expected to possess temperature inversion layers in their dayside atmospheres. Recent thermal emission observations have discovered several atomic and molecular species along with temperature inversions in UHJs. We observed the thermal emission spectra of two UHJs (WASP-33b and WASP-189b) with the GIANO-B high-resolution near-infrared spectrograph. Using the cross-correlation technique, we detected carbon monoxide (CO) in the dayside atmospheres of both planets. The detected CO lines are in emission, which agrees with previous discoveries of iron emission lines and temperature inversions in the two planets. This is the first detection of CO lines in emission with high-resolution spectroscopy. Further retrieval work combining the CO lines with other spectral features will enable a comprehensive understanding of the atmospheric properties such as temperature structures and C/O ratios. The detected CO and iron emission lines of WASP-189b have redshifted radial velocities of several km s⁻¹, which likely originate from a dayside to nightside wind in its atmosphere. Such a redshifted velocity has not been detected for the emission lines of WASP-33b, suggesting that the atmospheric circulation patterns of the two UHJs may be different.

Context. Clusters of galaxies reside at the nodes of the cosmic web, interconnected by filamentary structures that contain tenuous diffuse gas, especially in the warm-hot phase. Galaxy clusters grow by mergers of smaller objects and gas that are mainly accreted through these large-scale filaments. For the first time, the large-scale cosmic structure and a long gas-emission filament have been captured by eROSITA on board the Spectrum-Roentgen-Gamma mission in a direct X-ray observation of the A3391/95 field.
Aims: We investigate the assembly history of an A3391/95-like system of clusters and the thermo-chemical properties of the diffuse gas in it by connecting simulation predictions to the eROSITA observations with the aim to constrain the origin and nature of the gas in the pair-interconnecting bridge.
Methods: We analysed the properties of a system resembling A3391/95, extracted from the (352 h⁻¹ cMpc)³ volume of the Magneticum Pathfinder cosmological simulations at z = 0.07. We tracked the main progenitors of the pair clusters and of surrounding groups back in time to study the assembly history of the system and its evolution.
Results: Similarly to the observed A3391/95 system, the simulated cluster pair is embedded in a complex network of gas filaments, with structures aligned over more than 20 projected Mpc, and the whole region collapses towards the central overdense node. The spheres of influence (3 × R₂₀₀) of the two main clusters already overlap at z = 0.07, but their virial boundaries are still physically separated. The diffuse gas located in the interconnecting bridge closely reflects the warm-hot intergalactic medium, with a typical temperature of ~1 keV and an overdensity δ ~ 100 with respect to the mean baryon density of the Universe, and a lower enrichment level compared to the intra-cluster medium in clusters. We find that most of the bridge gas collapsed from directions roughly orthogonal to the intra-cluster gas accretion directions, and its origin is mostly unrelated to the two cluster progenitors. We find clear signatures in the surrounding groups of infall motion towards the pair, such as significant radial velocities and a slowdown of gas compared to dark matter. These findings further support the hypothesis that the Northern Clump (MCXC J0621.7-5242) cluster infalls along a cosmic gas filament towards Abell 3391 and might be merging with it.
Conclusions: We conclude that in this configuration, the pair clusters of the A3391/95-like system are in a pre-merger phase and have not yet interacted. The diffuse gas in the interconnecting bridge is mostly warm filament gas and not tidally stripped cluster gas.

The lack of convergence of the convolution integrals appearing in next-to-leading-power (NLP) factorization theorems prevents the applications of existing methods to resum power-suppressed large logarithmic corrections in collider physics. We consider thrust distribution in the two-jet region for the flavour-nonsinglet off-diagonal contribution, where a gluon-initiated jet recoils against a quark-antiquark pair, which is power-suppressed. With the help of operatorial endpoint factorization conditions, we obtain a factorization formula, where the individual terms are free from endpoint divergences in convolutions and can be expressed in terms of renormalized hard, soft and collinear functions in four dimensions. This allows us to perform the first resummation of the endpoint-divergent SCET$_{\rm I}$ observables at the leading logarithmic accuracy using exclusively renormalization-group methods. The presented approach relies on universal properties of the soft and collinear limits and may serve as a paradigm for the systematic NLP resummation for other $1\to 2$ and $2\to 1$ collider physics processes.

Using synthetic Lyman-$\alpha$ forests from the Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument (DESI) survey, we present a study of the impact of errors in the estimation of quasar redshift on the Lyman-$\alpha$ correlation functions. Estimates of quasar redshift have large uncertainties of a few hundred $\text{km s}^{-1}\,$ due to the broadness of the emission lines and the intrinsic shifts from other emission lines. We inject Gaussian random redshift errors into the mock quasar catalogues, and measure the auto-correlation and the Lyman-$\alpha$-quasar cross-correlation functions. We find a smearing of the BAO feature in the radial direction, but changes in the peak position are negligible. However, we see a significant unphysical correlation for small separations transverse to the line of sight which increases with the amplitude of the redshift errors. We interpret this contamination as a result of the broadening of emission lines in the measured mean continuum, caused by quasar redshift errors, combined with the unrealistically strong clustering of the simulated quasars on small scales.

Aims: The eROSITA Final Equatorial-Depth Survey (eFEDS), executed during the performance verification phase of the Spectrum-Roentgen-Gamma (SRG)/eROSITA telescope, was completed in November 2019. One of the science goals of this survey is to demonstrate the ability of eROSITA to detect samples of clusters and groups at the final depth of the eROSITA all-sky survey.
Methods: Because of the sizeable (≈26″ HEW FOV average) point-spread function of eROSITA, high-redshift clusters of galaxies or compact nearby groups hosting bright active galactic nuclei (AGN) can be misclassified as point sources by the source detection algorithms. A total of 346 galaxy clusters and groups in the redshift range of 0.1 < z < 1.3 were identified based on their red sequenc in the eFEDS point source catalog.
Results: We examine the multiwavelength properties of these clusters and groups to understand the potential biases in our selection process and the completeness of the extent-selected sample. We find that the majority of the clusters and groups in the point source sample are indeed underluminous and compact compared to the extent-selected sample. Their faint X-ray emission, well below the flux limit of the extent-selected eFEDS clusters, and their compact X-ray emission are likely to be the main reason for this misclassification. In the sample, we confirm that 10% of the sources host AGN in their brightest cluster galaxies (BCGs) through optical spectroscopy and visual inspection. By studying their X-ray, optical, infrared, and radio properties, we establish a method for identifying clusters and groups that host AGN in their BCGs. We successfully test this method on the current point source catalog through the Sloan Digital Sky Survey optical spectroscopy and find eight low-mass clusters and groups with active radio-loud AGN that are particularly bright in the infrared. They include eFEDS J091437.8+024558, eFEDS J083520.1+012516, and eFEDS J092227.1+043339 at redshifts 0.3−0.4.
Conclusions: This study helps us to characterize and understand our selection process and assess the completeness of the eROSITA extent-selected samples. The method we developed will be used to identify high-redshift clusters, AGN-dominated groups, and low-mass clusters that are misclassified in the future eROSITA all-sky survey point source catalogs.

Table 3 is only available at the CDS via anonymous ftp to cdsarc.u-strasbg.fr (ftp://130.79.128.5) or via http://cdsarc.u-strasbg.fr/viz-bin/cat/J/A+A/661/A10

Context. Red supergiant (RSGs) are cool massive stars in a late phase of their evolution when the stellar envelope becomes fully convective. They are the brightest stars in the universe at infrared light and can be detected in galaxies far beyond the Local Group, allowing for accurate determination of chemical composition of galaxies. The study of their physical properties is extremely important for various phenomena including the final fate of massive stars as type II supernovae and gravitational wave progenitors.
Aims: We explore the well-studied nearby young stellar cluster χ Per, which contains a relatively large population of RSG stars. Using Gaia EDR3 data, we find the distance of the cluster (d = 2.260 ± 0.020 kpc) from blue main sequence stars and compare with RSG parallax measurements analysing the parallax uncertainties of both groups. We then investigate the variability of the convection-related surface structure as a source for parallax measurement uncertainty.
Methods: We use state-of-the-art three-dimensional radiative hydrodynamics simulations of convection with CO5BOLD and the post-processing radiative transfer code OPTIM3D to compute intensity maps in the Gaia G photometric system. We calculate the variabiltiy, as a function of time, of the intensity-weighted mean (or the photo-center) from the synthetic maps. We then select the RSG stars in the cluster and compare their uncertainty on parallaxes to the predictions of photocentre displacements.
Results: The synthetic maps of RSG show extremely irregular and temporal variable surfaces due to convection-related dynamics. Consequentially, the position of the photo-center varies during Gaia measurements between 0.033 and 0.130 AU (≈1 to ≈5% of the corresponding simulation stellar radius). We argue that the variability of the convection-related surface structures accounts for a substantial part of the Gaia EDR3 parallax error of the RSG sample of χ Per.
Conclusions: We suggest that the variation of the uncertainty on Gaia parallax could be exploited quantitatively using appropriate RHD simulations to extract, in a unique way, important information about the stellar dynamics and parameters of RSG stars.

Movies are available at https://www.aanda.org

Theoretical models of the co-evolution of galaxies and active galactic nuclei (AGNs) ascribe an important role in the feedback process to a short, luminous, obscured, and dust-enshrouded phase during which the accretion rate of the supermassive black hole is expected to be at its maximum and the associated AGN-driven winds are also predicted to be maximally developed. To test this scenario, we have isolated a textbook candidate from the eROSITA Final Equatorial-Depth Survey (eFEDS) obtained within the performance and verification program of the eROSITA telescope on board the Spectrum Röntgen Gamma mission. From an initial catalogue of 246 hard X-ray selected sources that are matched with the photometric and spectroscopic information available within the eROSITA and Hyper Suprime-Cam consortia, three candidates quasars in the feedback phase have been isolated applying a diagnostic proposed previously. Only one source (eFEDS J091157.4+014327) has a spectrum already available (from SDSS-DR16, z = 0.603) and it unambiguously shows abroad component (full width at half maximum ~1650 kms⁻¹) in the [OIII]5007 line. The associated observed L_[OIII] is ~2.6 × 10⁴² erg s⁻¹, one to two orders of magnitude higher than that observed in local Seyfert galaxies and comparable to those observed in a sample of z ~ 0.5 type 1 quasars. From the multi-wavelength data available, we derive an Eddington ratio (L_bol/L_Edd) of ~0.25 and a bolometric correction in the hard X-ray band of k_bol ~ 10, which is lower than the corrections observed for objects at similar bolometric luminosity. These properties, along with the outflow, the high X-ray luminosity, the moderate X-ray obscuration (L_X∽10^44.8 erg s⁻¹, N_H∽2.7 × 10²² cm⁻²), and the red optical colour, all match the prediction of quasars in the feedback phase from merger-driven models. Forecasting to the full eROSITA all-sky survey with its spectroscopic follow-up, we predict that by the end of 2024, we will have a sample of few hundred such objects at z= 0.5-2.

The Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument (DESI) has embarked on an ambitious five-year survey to explore the nature of dark energy with spectroscopy of 40 million galaxies and quasars. DESI will determine precise redshifts and employ the Baryon Acoustic Oscillation method to measure distances from the nearby universe to z > 3.5, as well as measure the growth of structure and probe potential modifications to general relativity. In this paper we describe the significant instrumentation we developed for the DESI survey. The new instrumentation includes a wide-field, 3.2-deg diameter prime-focus corrector that focuses the light onto 5020 robotic fiber positioners on the 0.812 m diameter, aspheric focal surface. The positioners and their fibers are divided among ten wedge-shaped petals. Each petal is connected to one of ten spectrographs via a contiguous, high-efficiency, nearly 50 m fiber cable bundle. The ten spectrographs each use a pair of dichroics to split the light into three channels that together record the light from 360 - 980 nm with a resolution of 2000 to 5000. We describe the science requirements, technical requirements on the instrumentation, and management of the project. DESI was installed at the 4-m Mayall telescope at Kitt Peak, and we also describe the facility upgrades to prepare for DESI and the installation and functional verification process. DESI has achieved all of its performance goals, and the DESI survey began in May 2021. Some performance highlights include RMS positioner accuracy better than 0.1", SNR per √(Å) > 0.5 for a z > 2 quasar with flux 0.28e-17 erg/s/cm^2/A at 380 nm in 4000s, and median SNR = 7 of the [OII] doublet at 8e-17 erg/s/cm^2 in a 1000s exposure for emission line galaxies at z = 1.4 - 1.6. We conclude with highlights from the on-sky validation and commissioning of the instrument, key successes, and lessons learned. (abridged)

We model here the merger histories of the supermassive black hole (SMBH) population in the late stages of a cosmological simulation of a ~ 2 × 10¹³ M _⊙ galaxy group. The gravitational dynamics around the several tens of SMBHs (M _• > 7.5 × 10⁷ M _⊙) hosted by the galaxies in the group is computed at high accuracy using regularized integration with the KETJU code. The 11 SMBHs that form binaries and a hierarchical triplet eventually merge after hardening through dynamical friction, stellar scattering, and gravitational wave (GW) emission. The binaries form at eccentricities of e ~ 0.3-0.9, with one system evolving to a very high eccentricity of e = 0.998, and merge on timescales of a few tens to several hundred megayears. During the simulation, the merger-induced GW recoil kicks eject one SMBH remnant from the central host galaxy. This temporarily drives the galaxy off the M _•-σ _⋆ relation; however, the galaxy returns to the relation due to subsequent galaxy mergers, which bring in new SMBHs. This showcases a possible mechanism contributing to the observed scatter of the M _•-σ _⋆ relation. Finally, we show that pulsar timing arrays and LISA would be able to detect parts of the GW signals from the SMBH mergers that occur during the ~4 Gyr time span simulated with KETJU.

In this work we study possible connections between B-meson anomalies and Kaon physics observables in the context of combined solutions with the singlet and triplet scalar leptoquarks S₁ and S₃. By assuming a flavor structure for the leptoquark couplings dictated by a minimally broken U (2^{) 5} flavor symmetry we can make a sharp connection between these two classes of observables. We find that the bound on B (K⁺→π⁺ν ν ) from NA62 puts already some tension in the model, while the present limits on B (K_L→μ⁺μ^-) and μ →e conversion in nuclei can be saturated. Relaxing instead the flavor assumption we study what values for B (K⁺→π⁺ν ν ) , as well as for B (K_L→π⁰ν ν ) and B (K_{L ,S}→μ⁺μ^-) , are viable compatibly with all other phenomenological constraints.

We present spectroscopic measurements for 71 galaxies associated with 62 of the brightest high-redshift submillimetre sources from the Southern fields of the Herschel Astrophysical Terahertz Large Area Survey (H-ATLAS), while targeting 85 sources which resolved into 142. We have obtained robust redshift measurements for all sources using the 12-m Array and an efficient tuning of ALMA to optimize its use as a redshift hunter, with 73 per cent of the sources having a robust redshift identification. Nine of these redshift identifications also rely on observations from the Atacama Compact Array. The spectroscopic redshifts span a range 1.41 < z < 4.53 with a mean value of 2.75, and the CO emission line full-width at half-maxima range between $\rm 110\, km\, s^{-1} \lt FWHM \lt 1290\, km\, s^{-1}$ with a mean value of ~500 km s^-1, in line with other high-z samples. The derived CO(1-0) luminosity is significantly elevated relative to line-width to CO(1-0) luminosity scaling relation, which is suggestive of lensing magnification across our sources. In fact, the distribution of magnification factors inferred from the CO equivalent widths is consistent with expectations from galaxy-galaxy lensing models, though there is a hint of an excess at large magnifications that may be attributable to the additional lensing optical depth from galaxy groups or clusters.

The RNA world is one of the principal hypotheses to explain the emergence of living systems on the prebiotic Earth. It posits that RNA oligonucleotides acted as both carriers of information as well as catalytic molecules, promoting their own replication. However, it does not explain the origin of the catalytic RNA molecules. How could the transition from a pre-RNA to an RNA world occur? A starting point to answer this question is to analyze the dynamics in sequence space on the lowest level, where mononucleotide and short oligonucleotides come together and collectively evolve into larger molecules. To this end, we study the sequence-dependent self-assembly of polymers from a random initial pool of short building blocks via templated ligation. Templated ligation requires two strands that are hybridized adjacently on a third strand. The thermodynamic stability of such a configuration crucially depends on the sequence context and, therefore, significantly influences the ligation probability. However, the sequence context also has a kinetic effect, since non-complementary nucleotide pairs in the vicinity of the ligation site stall the ligation reaction. These sequence-dependent thermodynamic and kinetic effects are explicitly included in our stochastic model. Using this model, we investigate the system-level dynamics inside a non-equilibrium ‘RNA reactor’ enabling a fast chemical activation of the termini of interacting oligomers. Moreover, the RNA reactor subjects the oligomer pool to periodic temperature changes inducing the reshuffling of the system. The binding stability of strands typically grows with the number of complementary nucleotides forming the hybridization site. While shorter strands unbind spontaneously during the cold phase, larger complexes only disassemble during the temperature peaks. Inside the RNA reactor, strand growth is balanced by cleavage via hydrolysis, such that the oligomer pool eventually reaches a non-equilibrium stationary state characterized by its length and sequence distribution. How do motif-dependent energy and stalling parameters affect the sequence composition of the pool of long strands? As a critical factor for self-enhancing sequence selection, we identify kinetic stalling due to non-complementary base pairs at the ligation site. Kinetic stalling enables cascades of self-amplification that result in a strong reduction of occupied states in sequence space. Moreover, we discuss the significance of the symmetry breaking for the transition from a pre-RNA to an RNA world.

Photoevaporative winds are a promising mechanism for dispersing protoplanetary discs, but so far theoretical models have been unable to agree on the relative roles that the X-ray, Extreme Ultraviolet or Far Ultraviolet play in driving the winds. This has been attributed to a variety of methodological differences between studies, including their approach to radiative transfer and thermal balance, the choice of irradiating spectrum employed, and the processes available to cool the gas. We use the MOCASSIN radiative transfer code to simulate wind heating for a variety of spectra on a static density grid taken from simulations of an EUV-driven wind. We explore the impact of choosing a single representative X-ray frequency on their ability to drive a wind by measuring the maximum heated column as a function of photon energy. We demonstrate that for reasonable luminosities and spectra, the most effective energies are at a few 100 eV, firmly in the softer regions of the X-ray spectrum, while X-rays with energies ~1000 eV interact too weakly with disc gas to provide sufficient heating to drive a wind. We develop a simple model to explain these findings. We argue that further increases in the cooling above our models - for example due to molecular rovibrational lines - may further restrict the heating to the softer energies but are unlikely to prevent X-ray heated winds from launching entirely; increasing the X-ray luminosity has the opposite effect. The various results of photoevaporative wind models should therefore be understood in terms of the choice of irradiating spectrum.

We present the median-stacked Lyman-α (Lyα) surface brightness profiles of 968 spectroscopically selected Lyα emitting galaxies (LAEs) at redshifts 1.9 < z < 3.5 in the early data of the Hobby-Eberly Telescope Dark Energy Experiment. The selected LAEs are high-confidence Lyα detections with high signal-to-noise ratios observed with good seeing conditions (point-spread function FWHM <1.″4), excluding active galactic nuclei. The Lyα luminosities of the LAEs are 10^42.4-10⁴³ erg s^-1. We detect faint emission in the median-stacked radial profiles at the level of <?CDATA $(3.6\pm 1.3)\times {10}^{-20}\,\mathrm{erg}\,{{\rm{s}}}^{-1}\,{\mathrm{cm}}^{-2}\,{\mathrm{arcsec}}^{-2}$?> from the surrounding Lyα halos out to r ≃ 160 kpc (physical). The shape of the median-stacked radial profile is consistent at r < 80 kpc with that of much fainter LAEs at 3 < z < 4 observed with the Multi Unit Spectroscopic Explorer (MUSE), indicating that the median-stacked Lyα profiles have similar shapes at redshifts 2 < z < 4 and across a factor of 10 in Lyα luminosity. While we agree with the results from the MUSE sample at r < 80 kpc, we extend the profile over a factor of two in radius. At r > 80 kpc, our profile is flatter than the MUSE model. The measured profile agrees at most radii with that of galaxies in the Byrohl et al. cosmological radiative transfer simulation at z = 3. This suggests that the surface brightness of a Lyα halo at r ≲ 100 kpc is dominated by resonant scattering of Lyα photons from star-forming regions in the central galaxy, whereas at r > 100 kpc, it is dominated by photons from galaxies in surrounding dark matter halos.

We study the evolution of dust in a cosmological volume using a hydrodynamical simulation in which the dust production is coupled with the MUPPI (MUlti Phase Particle Integrator) sub-resolution model of star formation and feedback. As for the latter, we keep as reference the model setup calibrated previously to match the general properties of Milky Way like galaxies in zoom-in simulations. However, we suggest that an increase of the star formation efficiency with the local dust to gas ratio would better reproduce the observed evolution of the cosmic star formation density. Moreover, the paucity of quenched galaxies at low redshift demands a stronger role of AGN feedback. We tune the parameters ruling direct dust production from evolved stars and accretion in the inter stellar medium to get scaling relations involving dust, stellar mass and metallicity in good agreement with observations. In low mass galaxies the accretion process is inefficient. As a consequence, they remain poorer in silicate and small grains than higher mass ones. We reproduce reasonably well the few available data on the radial distribution of dust outside the galactic region, supporting the assumption that the dust and gas dynamics are well coupled at galactic scales.

Experimental searches for pure glueball states have proven challenging and so far yielded no results. This is believed to occur because glueballs mix with the ordinary $q\bar q$ states with the same quantum numbers. We will discuss an alternative mechanism, the formation of the glueball-meson molecular states. We will argue that the wave functions of already observed excited meson states may contain a significant part due to such molecular states. We discuss the phenomenology of glueball molecules and comment on a possible charmless component of the $XYZ$ states.

We perform two distinct spatio-spectral reconstructions of the gamma-ray sky in the range of 0.56-316 GeV based on Fermi Large Area Telescope (LAT) data. Both describe the sky brightness to be composed of a diffuse-emission and a point-source component. The first model requires minimal assumptions and provides a template-free reconstruction as a reference. It makes use of spatial and spectral correlations to distinguish between the different components. The second model is physics-informed and further differentiates between diffuse emission of hadronic and leptonic origin. For this, we assume parametric, but spatially varying energy spectra to distinguish between the processes and use thermal Galactic dust observations to indicate the preferred sites of hadronic interactions. To account for instrumental effects we model the point-spread, the energy dispersion, and the exposure of the telescope throughout the observation. The reconstruction problem is formulated as a Bayesian inference task, that is solved by variational inference. We show decompositions of the Gamma-ray flux into diffuse and point-like emissions, and of the diffuse emissions into multiple physically motivated components. The diffuse decomposition provides an unprecedented view of the Galactic leptonic diffuse emission. It shows the Fermi bubbles and their spectral variations in high fidelity and other areas exhibiting strong cosmic ray electron contents, such as a thick disk in the inner Galaxy and outflow regions. Furthermore, we report a hard spectrum gamma ray arc in the northern outer bubble co-spatial with the reported X-ray arc by the eROSITA collaboration. All our spatio-spectral sky reconstructions and their uncertainty quantification are publicly available.

Gravitationally lensed supernovae (LSNe) are important probes of cosmic expansion, but they remain rare and difficult to find. Current cosmic surveys likely contain and 5-10 LSNe in total while next-generation experiments are expected to contain several hundreds to a few thousands of these systems. We search for these systems in observed Dark Energy Survey (DES) 5-year SN fields -- 10 3-sq. deg. regions of sky imaged in the $griz$ bands approximately every six nights over five years. To perform the search, we utilize the DeepZipper approach: a multi-branch deep learning architecture trained on image-level simulations of LSNe that simultaneously learns spatial and temporal relationships from time series of images. We find that our method obtains a LSN recall of 61.13% and a false positive rate of 0.02% on the DES SN field data. DeepZipper selected 2,245 candidates from a magnitude-limited ($m_i$ $<$ 22.5) catalog of 3,459,186 systems. We employ human visual inspection to review systems selected by the network and find three candidate LSNe in the DES SN fields.

We construct a relativistic chiral nucleon-nucleon interaction up to the next-to-next-to-leading order in covariant baryon chiral perturbation theory. We show that a good description of the np phase shifts up to Tlab=200  MeV and even higher can be achieved with a ˜χ2/d.o.f. less than 1. Both the next-to-leading-order results and the next-to-next-to-leading-order results describe the phase shifts equally well up to Tlab=200  MeV, but for higher energies, the latter behaves better, showing satisfactory convergence. The relativistic chiral potential provides the most essential inputs for relativistic ab initio studies of nuclear structure and reactions, which has been in need for almost two decades.

A dark energy-like component in the early universe, known as early dark energy (EDE), is a proposed solution to the Hubble tension. Currently, there is no consensus in the literature as to whether EDE can simultaneously solve the Hubble tension and provide an adequate fit to the data from the cosmic microwave background (CMB) and large-scale structure of the universe. In this work, we deconstruct the current constraints from the Planck CMB and the full-shape clustering data of the Baryon Oscillation Spectroscopic Survey to understand the origin of different conclusions in the literature. We use two different analyses, a grid sampling and a profile likelihood, to investigate whether the current constraints suffer from volume effects upon marginalization and are biased toward some values of the EDE fraction, f _EDE. We find that the f _EDE allowed by the data strongly depends on the particular choice of the other parameters of the model, and that several choices of these parameters prefer larger values of f _EDE than in the Markov Chain Monte Carlo analysis. This suggests that volume effects are the reason behind the disagreement in the literature. Motivated by this, we use a profile likelihood to analyze the EDE model and compute a confidence interval for f _EDE, finding f _EDE = 0.072 ± 0.036 (68% C.L.). Our approach gives a confidence interval that is not subject to volume effects and provides a powerful tool to understand whether EDE is a possible solution to the Hubble tension.

Accurate characterization of the polarized dust emission from our Galaxy will be decisive in the quest for the cosmic microwave background (CMB) primordial B-modes. An incomplete modeling of its potentially complex spectral properties could lead to biases in the CMB polarization analyses and to a spurious measurement of the tensor-to-scalar ratio r. It is particularly crucial for future surveys like the LiteBIRD satellite, the goal of which is to constrain the faint primordial signal leftover by inflation with an accuracy on the tensor-to-scalar ratio r of the order of 10⁻³. Variations of the dust properties along and between lines of sight lead to unavoidable distortions of the spectral energy distribution (SED) that cannot be easily anticipated by standard component-separation methods. This issue can be tackled using a moment expansion of the dust SED, an innovative parametrization method imposing minimal assumptions on the sky complexity. In the present paper, we apply this formalism to the B-mode cross-angular power spectra computed from simulated LiteBIRD polarization data at frequencies between 100 and 402 GHz that contain CMB, dust, and instrumental noise. The spatial variation of the dust spectral parameters (spectral index β and temperature T) in our simulations lead to significant biases on r (∼21 σ_r) if not properly taken into account. Performing the moment expansion in β, as in previous studies, reduces the bias but does not lead to sufficiently reliable estimates of r. We introduce, for the first time, the expansion of the cross-angular power spectra SED in both β and T, showing that, at the sensitivity of LiteBIRD, the SED complexity due to temperature variations needs to be taken into account in order to prevent analysis biases on r. Thanks to this expansion, and despite the existing correlations between some of the dust moments and the CMB signal responsible for a rise in the error on r, we can measure an unbiased value of the tensor-to-scalar ratio with a dispersion as low as σ_r = 8.8 × 10⁻⁴.

We present analytic results for the two tennis-court integral families relevant to 2 → 2 scattering processes involving one massive external particle and massless propagators in terms of Goncharov polylogarithms of up to transcendental weight six. We also present analytic results for physical kinematics for the ladder-box family and the two tennis-court families in terms of real-valued polylogarithmic functions, making our solutions well-suited for phenomenological applications.

Context. At present, there are strong indications that white dwarf (WD) stars with masses well below the Chandrasekhar limit (M_Ch ≈ 1.4 M_⊙) contribute a significant fraction of SN Ia progenitors. The relative fraction of stable iron-group elements synthesized in the explosion has been suggested as a possible discriminant between M_Ch and sub-M_Ch events. In particular, it is thought that the higher-density ejecta of M_Ch WDs, which favours the synthesis of stable isotopes of nickel, results in prominent [Ni II] lines in late-time spectra (≳150 d past explosion).
Aims: We study the explosive nucleosynthesis of stable nickel in SNe Ia resulting from M_Ch and sub-M_Ch progenitors. We explore the potential for lines of [Ni II] in the optical an near-infrared (at 7378 Å and 1.94 μm) in late-time spectra to serve as a diagnostic of the exploding WD mass.
Methods: We reviewed stable Ni yields across a large variety of published SN Ia models. Using 1D M_Ch delayed-detonation and sub-M_Ch detonation models, we studied the synthesis of stable Ni isotopes (in particular, ⁵⁸Ni) and investigated the formation of [Ni II] lines using non-local thermodynamic equilibrium radiative-transfer simulations with the CMFGEN code.
Results: We confirm that stable Ni production is generally more efficient in M_Ch explosions at solar metallicity (typically 0.02-0.08 M_⊙ for the ⁵⁸Ni isotope), but we note that the ⁵⁸Ni yield in sub-M_Ch events systematically exceeds 0.01 M_⊙ for WDs that are more massive than one solar mass. We find that the radiative proton-capture reaction ⁵⁷Co(p, γ)⁵⁸Ni is the dominant production mode for ⁵⁸Ni in both M_Ch and sub-M_Ch models, while the α-capture reaction on ⁵⁴Fe has a negligible impact on the final ⁵⁸Ni yield. More importantly, we demonstrate that the lack of [Ni II] lines in late-time spectra of sub-M_Ch events is not always due to an under-abundance of stable Ni; rather, it results from the higher ionization of Ni in the inner ejecta. Conversely, the strong [Ni II] lines predicted in our 1D M_Ch models are completely suppressed when ⁵⁶Ni is sufficiently mixed with the innermost layers, which are rich in stable iron-group elements.
Conclusions: [Ni II] lines in late-time SN Ia spectra have a complex dependency on the abundance of stable Ni, which limits their use in distinguishing among M_Ch and sub-M_Ch progenitors. However, we argue that a low-luminosity SN Ia displaying strong [Ni II] lines would most likely result from a Chandrasekhar-mass progenitor.

We construct a relativistic chiral nucleon-nucleon interaction up to the next-to-next-to-leading order in covariant baryon chiral perturbation theory. We show that a good description of the n p phase shifts up to T_lab=200 MeV and even higher can be achieved with a χ^{∼ 2}/d .o .f . less than 1. Both the next-to-leading-order results and the next-to-next-to-leading-order results describe the phase shifts equally well up to T_lab=200 MeV , but for higher energies, the latter behaves better, showing satisfactory convergence. The relativistic chiral potential provides the most essential inputs for relativistic ab initio studies of nuclear structure and reactions, which has been in need for almost two decades.

The outflows from neutrino-cooled black hole accretion disks formed in neutron-star mergers or cores of collapsing stars are expected to be neutron-rich enough to explain a large fraction of elements created by the rapid neutron-capture process, but their precise chemical composition remains elusive. Here, we investigate the role of fast neutrino flavor conversion, motivated by the findings of our post-processing analysis that shows evidence of electron-neutrino lepton-number crossings deep inside the disk, hence suggesting possibly nontrivial effects due to neutrino flavor mixing. We implement a parametric, dynamically self-consistent treatment of fast conversion in time-dependent simulations and examine the impact on the disk and its outflows. By activating the otherwise inefficient, emission of heavy-lepton neutrinos, fast conversions enhance the disk cooling rates and reduce the absorption rates of electron-type neutrinos, causing a reduction of the electron fraction in the disk by 0.03-0.06 and in the ejected material by 0.01-0.03. The rapid neutron-capture process yields are enhanced by typically no more than a factor of two, rendering the overall impact of fast conversions modest. The kilonova is prolonged as a net result of increased lanthanide opacities and enhanced radioactive heating rates. We observe only mild sensitivity to the disk mass, the condition for the onset of flavor conversion, and to the considered cases of flavor mixing. Remarkably, parametric models of flavor mixing that conserve the lepton numbers per family result in an overall smaller impact than models invoking three-flavor equipartition, often assumed in previous works.

Starting from first principles, we study radiative transfer by new feebly-interacting bosons (FIBs) such as axions, axion-like particles (ALPs), dark photons, and others. Our key simplification is to include only boson emission or absorption (including decay), but not scattering between different modes of the radiation field. Based on a given distribution of temperature and FIB absorption rate in a star, we derive explicit volume-integral expressions for the boson luminosity, reaching from the free-streaming to the strong-trapping limit. The latter is seen explicitly to correspond to quasi-thermal emission from a "FIB sphere" according to the Stefan-Boltzmann law. Our results supersede expressions and approximations found in the recent literature on FIB emission from a supernova core and, for radiatively unstable FIBs, provide explicit expressions for the nonlocal ("ballistic") transfer of energy recently discussed in horizontal-branch stars.

We introduce an open-source package called QTraj that solves the Lindblad equation for heavy-quarkonium dynamics using the quantum trajectories algorithm. The package allows users to simulate the suppression of heavy-quarkonium states using externally-supplied input from 3+1D hydrodynamics simulations. The code uses a split-step pseudo-spectral method for updating the wave-function between jumps, which is implemented using the open-source multi-threaded FFTW3 package. This allows one to have manifestly unitary evolution when using real-valued potentials. In this paper, we provide detailed documentation of QTraj 1.0, installation instructions, and present various tests and benchmarks of the code.

We analyze the flavor violating muon decay μ → eχ, where χ is a massive gauge boson, with emphasis in the regime where χ is ultralight. We first study this process from an effective field theory standpoint in terms of form factors. We then present two explicit models where μ → eχ is generated at tree level and at the one-loop level. We also comment on the prospects of observing the process μ → eχ in view of the current limits on μ → 3 e from the SINDRUM collaboration.

Knowing the Galactic 3D dust distribution is relevant for understanding many processes in the interstellar medium and for correcting many astronomical observations for dust absorption and emission. Here, we aim for a 3D reconstruction of the Galactic dust distribution with an increase in the number of meaningful resolution elements by orders of magnitude with respect to previous reconstructions, while taking advantage of the dust's spatial correlations to inform the dust map. We use iterative grid refinement to define a log-normal process in spherical coordinates. This log-normal process assumes a fixed correlation structure, which was inferred in an earlier reconstruction of Galactic dust. Our map is informed through 111 Million data points, combining data of PANSTARRS, 2MASS, Gaia DR2 and ALLWISE. The log-normal process is discretized to 122 Billion degrees of freedom, a factor of 400 more than our previous map. We derive the most probable posterior map and an uncertainty estimate using natural gradient descent and the Fisher-Laplace approximation. The dust reconstruction covers a quarter of the volume of our Galaxy, with a maximum coordinate distance of $16\,\text{kpc}$, and meaningful information can be found up to at distances of $4\,$kpc, still improving upon our earlier map by a factor of 5 in maximal distance, of $900$ in volume, and of about eighteen in angular grid resolution. Unfortunately, the maximum posterior approach chosen to make the reconstruction computational affordable introduces artifacts and reduces the accuracy of our uncertainty estimate. Despite of the apparent limitations of the presented 3D dust map, a good part of the reconstructed structures are confirmed by independent maser observations. Thus, the map is a step towards reliable 3D Galactic cartography and already can serve for a number of tasks, if used with care.

In this note, as an input to the Snowmass studies, we provide a broad-brush picture of the physics output of future colliders as a function of their center of mass energies and luminosities. Instead of relying on precise projections of physics reaches, which are lacking in many cases, we mainly focused on simple benchmarks of physics yields, such as the number of Higgs boson produced. More detailed considerations for lepton colliders are given since there have been various recent proposals. A brief summary for hadron colliders based on a simple scaling estimate of the physics reaches is also included.

Context. The Carina Nebula complex (CNC) is one of the most massive and active star-forming regions in our Galaxy and it contains several large young star clusters. The distances of the individual clusters and their physical connection were poorly known up to now, with strongly discrepant results reported in the literature.
Aims: We want to determine reliable distances of the young stellar clusters in the central Carina Nebula region (in particular, Tr 14, 15, and 16) and the prominent clusters NGC 3324 and NGC 3293 in the northwestern periphery of the CNC.
Methods: We analyzed the parallaxes in Gaia EDR3 for a comprehensive sample of 237 spectroscopically identified OB stars, as well as for 9562 X-ray-selected young stars throughout the complex. We also performed an astrometric analysis to identify members of the young cluster vdBH 99, which is located in the foreground of the northwestern part of the Carina Nebula.
Results: We find that the distances of the investigated clusters in the CNC are equal within ≤2%, and yield very consistent most likely mean distance values of 2.36_−0.05^+0.05 kpc for the OB star sample and 2.34_−0.06^+0.05 kpc for the sample of X-ray-selected young stars.
Conclusions: Our results show that the clusters in the CNC constitute a coherent star-forming region, in particular with regard to NGC 3324 and NGC 3293 at the northwestern periphery, which are (within ≤2%) at the same distance as the central Carina Nebula. For the foreground cluster vdBH 99, we find a mean distance of 441₋₂⁺² pc and an age of ≃60 Myr. We quantified the contamination of X-ray-selected samples of Carina Nebula stars based on members of this foreground cluster.

Table 1 is only available at the CDS via anonymous ftp to cdsarc.u-strasbg.fr (ftp://130.79.128.5) or via http://cdsarc.u-strasbg.fr/viz-bin/cat/J/A+A/660/A11

We report the robust detection of coherent, localized deviations from Keplerian rotation possibly associated with the presence of two giant planets embedded in the disk around HD 163296. The analysis is performed using the DISCMINER channel map modeling framework on ¹²CO J = 2-1 DSHARP data. Not only orbital radius but also azimuth of the planets are retrieved by our technique. One of the candidate planets, detected at R = 94 ± 6 au, ϕ = 50° ± 3° (P94), is near the center of one of the gaps in dust continuum emission and is consistent with a planet mass of 1 M _Jup. The other planet, located at R = 261 ± 4 au, ϕ = 57° ± 1° (P261), is in the region where a velocity kink was previously observed in ¹²CO channel maps. Also, we provide a simultaneous description of the height and temperature of the upper and lower emitting surfaces of the disk and propose the line width as a solid observable to track gas substructure. Using azimuthally averaged line width profiles, we detect gas gaps at R = 38, 88, and 136 au, closely matching the location of their dust and kinematical counterparts. Furthermore, we observe strong azimuthal asymmetries in line widths around the gas gap at R = 88 au, possibly linked to turbulent motions driven by the P94 planet. Our results confirm that the DISCMINER is capable of finding localized, otherwise unseen velocity perturbations thanks to its robust statistical framework, but also that it is well suited for studies of the gas properties and vertical structure of protoplanetary disks.

Evaluation of the effective-range parameters for the $T_{cc}^+$ state in the LHCb model is examined. The finite width of $D^*$ leads to a shift of the expansion point into the complex plane to match analytical properties of the expanded amplitude. We perform an analytic continuation of the three-body scattering amplitude to the complex plane in a vicinity of the branch point and develop a robust procedure for computation of the expansion coefficients. The results yield a nearly-real scattering length, and two contributions to the the effective range which have not been accounted before.

We study the connection of matter density and its tracers from the PDF perspective. One aspect of this connection is the conditional expectation value ⟨δtracer|δm⟩ when averaging both tracer and matter density over some scale. We present a new way to incorporate a Lagrangian bias expansion of this expectation value into standard frameworks for modelling the PDF of density fluctuations and counts-in-cells statistics. Using N-body simulations and mock galaxy catalogs we confirm the accuracy of this expansion and compare it to the more commonly used Eulerian parametrization. For halos hosting typical luminous red galaxies, the Lagrangian model provides a significantly better description of ⟨δtracer|δm⟩ at second order in perturbations. A second aspect of the matter-tracer connection is shot-noise, \ie the scatter of tracer density around ⟨δtracer|δm⟩. It is well known that this noise can be significantly non-Poissonian and we validate the performance of a more general, two-parameter shot-noise model for different tracers and simulations. Both parts of our analysis are meant to pave the way for forthcoming applications to survey data.

From Hubble Frontier Fields photometry, and data from the Multi Unit Spectroscopic Explorer on the Very Large Telescope, we build the Fundamental Plane (FP) relation for the early-type galaxies of the cluster Abell S1063. We use this relation to develop an improved strong lensing model of the total mass distribution of the cluster, determining the velocity dispersions of all 222 cluster members included in the model from their measured structural parameters. Fixing the hot gas component from X-ray data, the mass density distributions of the diffuse dark matter haloes are optimised by comparing the observed and model-predicted positions of 55 multiple images of 20 background sources, distributed over the redshift range 0.73−6.11. We determine the uncertainties on the model parameters with Monte Carlo Markov chains. Compared to previous works, our model allows for the inclusion of a scatter on the relation between the total mass and the velocity dispersion of cluster members, which also shows a shallower slope. We notice a lower statistical uncertainty on the value of some parameters, such as the core radius, of the diffuse mass component of the cluster. Thanks to a new estimate of the stellar mass of all members, we measure the cumulative projected mass profiles out to a radius of 350 kpc, for all baryonic and dark matter components of the cluster. At the outermost radius, we find a baryon fraction of 0.147±0.002. We compare the sub-haloes as described by our model with recent hydrodynamical cosmological simulations. We find good agreement in terms of the stellar over total mass fraction. On the other hand, we report some discrepancies in terms of the maximum circular velocity, which is an indication of their compactness, and the sub-halo mass function in the central cluster regions.

Dew is a common form of water that deposits from saturated air on colder surfaces. Although presumably common on primordial Earth, its potential involvement in the origin of life in early replication has not been investigated in detail. Here we report that it can drive the first stages of Darwinian evolution for DNA and RNA, first by periodically denaturing their structures at low temperatures and second by promoting the replication of long strands over short, faster replicating ones. Our experiments mimicked a partially water-filled primordial rock pore in the probable CO₂ atmosphere of Hadean Earth. Under heat flow, water continuously evaporated and recondensed as acidic dew droplets that created the humidity, salt and pH cycles that match many prebiotic replication chemistries. In low-salt and low-pH regimes, the strands melted at 30 K below the bulk melting temperature, whereas longer sequences preferentially accumulated at the droplet interface. Under an enzymatic replication to mimic a sped-up RNA world, long sequences of more than 1,000 nucleotides emerged. The replication was biased by the melting conditions of the dew and the initial short ATGC strands evolved into long AT-rich sequences with repetitive and structured nucleotide composition.

Phenomenological success of inflation models with axion and SU(2) gauge fields relies crucially on control of backreaction from particle production. Most of the previous study only demanded the backreaction terms in equations of motion for axion and gauge fields be small on the basis of order-of-magnitude estimation. In this paper, we solve the equations of motion with backreaction for a wide range of parameters of the spectator axion-SU(2) model. First, we find a new slow-roll solution of the axion-SU(2) system in the absence of backreaction. Next, we obtain accurate conditions for stable slow-roll solutions in the presence of backreaction. Finally, we show that the amplitude of primordial gravitational waves sourced by the gauge fields can exceed that of quantum vacuum fluctuations in spacetime by a large factor, without backreaction spoiling slow-roll dynamics. Imposing additional constraints on the power spectra of scalar and tensor modes measured at CMB scales, we find that the sourced contribution can be more than ten times the vacuum one. Imposing further a constraint of scalar modes non-linearly sourced by tensor modes, the two contributions can still be comparable.

In recent years there has been a rapidly growing body of experimental evidence for existence of exotic, multiquark hadrons, i.e. mesons which contain additional quarks, beyond the usual quark-antiquark pair and baryons which consist of more than three quarks. In all cases with robust evidence they contain at least one heavy quark Q=c or b, the majority including two heavy quarks. Two key theoretical questions have been triggered by these discoveries: (a) how are quarks organized inside these multiquark states -- as compact objects with all quarks within one confinement volume, interacting via color forces, perhaps with an important role played by diquarks, or as deuteron-like hadronic molecules, bound by light-meson exchange? (b) what other multiquark states should we expect? The two questions are tightly intertwined. Each of the interpretations provides a natural explanation of parts of the data, but neither explains all of the data. It is quite possible that both kinds of structures appear in Nature. It may also be the case that certain states are superpositions of the compact and molecular configurations. This Whitepaper brings together contributions from many leading practitioners in the field, representing a wide spectrum of theoretical interpretations. We discuss the importance of future experimental and phenomenological work, which will lead to better understandingof multiquark phenomena in QCD.

We present the second public data release (DR2) from the DECam Local Volume Exploration survey (DELVE). DELVE DR2 combines new DECam observations with archival DECam data from the Dark Energy Survey, the DECam Legacy Survey, and other DECam community programs. DELVE DR2 consists of ~160,000 exposures that cover >21,000 deg^2 of the high Galactic latitude (|b| > 10 deg) sky in four broadband optical/near-infrared filters (g, r, i, z). DELVE DR2 provides point-source and automatic aperture photometry for ~2.5 billion astronomical sources with a median 5σ point-source depth of g=24.3, r=23.9, i=23.5, and z=22.8 mag. A region of ~17,000 deg^2 has been imaged in all four filters, providing four-band photometric measurements for ~618 million astronomical sources. DELVE DR2 covers more than four times the area of the previous DELVE data release and contains roughly five times as many astronomical objects. DELVE DR2 is publicly available via the NOIRLab Astro Data Lab science platform.

The CMB lensing signal from cosmic voids and superclusters probes the growth of structure in the low-redshift cosmic web. In this analysis, we cross-correlated the Planck CMB lensing map with voids detected in the Dark Energy Survey Year 3 (Y3) data set ($\sim$5,000 deg$^{2}$), extending previous measurements using Y1 catalogues ($\sim$1,300 deg$^{2}$). Given the increased statistical power compared to Y1 data, we report a $6.6\sigma$ detection of negative CMB convergence ($\kappa$) imprints using approximately 3,600 voids detected from a redMaGiC luminous red galaxy sample. However, the measured signal is lower than expected from the MICE N-body simulation that is based on the $\Lambda$CDM model (parameters $\Omega_{\rm m} = 0.25$, $\sigma_8 = 0.8$). The discrepancy is associated mostly with the void centre region. Considering the full void lensing profile, we fit an amplitude $A_{\kappa}=\kappa_{\rm DES}/\kappa_{\rm MICE}$ to a simulation-based template with fixed shape and found a moderate $2\sigma$ deviation in the signal with $A_{\kappa}\approx0.79\pm0.12$. We also examined the WebSky simulation that is based on a Planck 2018 $\Lambda$CDM cosmology, but the results were even less consistent given the slightly higher matter density fluctuations than in MICE. We then identified superclusters in the DES and the MICE catalogues, and detected their imprints at the $8.4\sigma$ level; again with a lower-than-expected $A_{\kappa}=0.84\pm0.10$ amplitude. The combination of voids and superclusters yields a $10.3\sigma$ detection with an $A_{\kappa}=0.82\pm0.08$ constraint on the CMB lensing amplitude, thus the overall signal is $2.3\sigma$ weaker than expected from MICE.

We highlight the need for the development of comprehensive amplitude analysis methods to further our understanding of hadron spectroscopy. Reaction amplitudes constrained by first principles of $S$-matrix theory and by QCD phenomenology are needed to extract robust interpretations of the data from experiments and from lattice calculations.

Despite efforts over several decades, direct-detection experiments have not yet led to the discovery of the dark matter (DM) particle. This has led to increasing interest in alternatives to the Lambda CDM (LCDM) paradigm and alternative DM scenarios (including fuzzy DM, warm DM, self-interacting DM, etc.). In many of these scenarios, DM particles cannot be detected directly and constraints on their properties can ONLY be arrived at using astrophysical observations. The Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument (DESI) is currently one of the most powerful instruments for wide-field surveys. The synergy of DESI with ESA's Gaia satellite and future observing facilities will yield datasets of unprecedented size and coverage that will enable constraints on DM over a wide range of physical and mass scales and across redshifts. DESI will obtain spectra of the Lyman-alpha forest out to z~5 by detecting about 1 million QSO spectra that will put constraints on clustering of the low-density intergalactic gas and DM halos at high redshift. DESI will obtain radial velocities of 10 million stars in the Milky Way (MW) and Local Group satellites enabling us to constrain their global DM distributions, as well as the DM distribution on smaller scales. The paradigm of cosmological structure formation has been extensively tested with simulations. However, the majority of simulations to date have focused on collisionless CDM. Simulations with alternatives to CDM have recently been gaining ground but are still in their infancy. While there are numerous publicly available large-box and zoom-in simulations in the LCDM framework, there are no comparable publicly available WDM, SIDM, FDM simulations. DOE support for a public simulation suite will enable a more cohesive community effort to compare observations from DESI (and other surveys) with numerical predictions and will greatly impact DM science.

This paper will review the origins, development, and examples of new versions of Micro-Pattern Gas Detectors. The goal for MPGD development was the creation of detectors that could cost-effectively cover large areas while offering excellent position and timing resolution, and the ability to operate at high incident particle rates. The early MPGD developments culminated in the formation of the RD51 collaboration which has become the critical organization for the promotion of MPGDs and all aspects of their production, characterization, simulation, and uses in an expanding array of experimental configurations. For the Snowmass 2021 study, a number of Letters of Interest were received that illustrate ongoing developments and expansion of the use of MPGDs. In this paper, we highlight high precision timing, high rate application, trigger capability expansion of the SRS readout system, and a structure designed for low ion backflow.

Flavor violating processes in the lepton sector have highly suppressed branching ratios in the standard model. Thus, observation of lepton flavor violation (LFV) constitutes a clear indication of physics beyond the standard model (BSM). We review new physics searches in the processes that violate the conservation of lepton (muon) flavor by two units with muonia and muonium–antimuonium oscillations.

We revisit the theory of background fields constructed on the BRST-algebra of a spinning particle with $\mathcal{N}=4$ worldline supersymmetry, whose spectrum contains the graviton but no other fields. On a generic background, the closure of the BRST algebra implies the vacuum Einstein equations with a cosmological constant that is undetermined. On the other hand, in the "vacuum" background with no metric, the cohomology is given by a collection of free scalar- and vector fields. Only certain combinations of linear excitations, necessarily involving a vector field, can be extended beyond the linear level with the vector field inducing an Einstein metric.

We study the renormalization group of generic effective field theories that include gravity. We follow the on-shell amplitude approach, which provides a simple and efficient method to extract anomalous dimensions avoiding complications from gauge redundancies. As an invaluable tool we introduce a modified helicity h ∼ under which gravitons carry one unit instead of two. With this modified helicity we easily explain old and uncover new non-renormalization theorems for theories including gravitons. We provide complete results for the one-loop gravitational renormalization of a generic minimally coupled gauge theory with scalars and fermions and all orders in M_Pl, as well as for the renormalization of dimension-six operators including at least one graviton, all up to four external particles.

Dark matter (DM) self-interactions have been proposed to solve problems on small length scales within the standard cold DM cosmology. Here, we investigate the effects of DM self-interactions in merging systems of galaxies and galaxy clusters with equal and unequal mass ratios. We perform N-body DM-only simulations of idealized setups to study the effects of DM self-interactions that are elastic and velocity-independent. We go beyond the commonly adopted assumption of large-angle (rare) DM scatterings, paying attention to the impact of small-angle (frequent) scatterings on astrophysical observables and related quantities. Specifically, we focus on DM-galaxy offsets, galaxy-galaxy distances, halo shapes, morphology, and the phase-space distribution. Moreover, we compare two methods to identify peaks: one based on the gravitational potential and one based on isodensity contours. We find that the results are sensitive to the peak finding method, which poses a challenge for the analysis of merging systems in simulations and observations, especially for minor mergers. Large DM-galaxy offsets can occur in minor mergers, especially with frequent self-interactions. The subhalo tends to dissolve quickly for these cases. While clusters in late merger phases lead to potentially large differences between rare and frequent scatterings, we believe that these differences are non-trivial to extract from observations. We therefore study the galaxy/star populations which remain distinct even after the DM haloes have coalesced. We find that these collisionless tracers behave differently for rare and frequent scatterings, potentially giving a handle to learn about the micro-physics of DM.

We consider and derive the gravitational soft theorem up to the sub-subleading power from the perspective of effective Lagrangians. The emergent soft gauge symmetries of the effective Lagrangian provide a transparent explanation of why soft graviton emission is universal to sub-subleading power, but gauge boson emission is not. They also suggest a physical interpretation of the form of the soft factors in terms of the charges related to the soft transformations and the kinematics of the multipole expansion. The derivation is done directly at Lagrangian level, resulting in an operatorial form of the soft theorems. In order to highlight the differences and similarities of the gauge-theory and gravitational soft theorems, we include an extensive discussion of soft gauge-boson emission from scalar, fermionic and vector matter at subleading power.

We present zELDA (redshift Estimator for Line profiles of Distant Lyman Alpha emitters), an open source code to fit Lyman α (Ly α) line profiles. The main motivation is to provide the community with an easy to use and fast tool to analyse Ly α line profiles uniformly to improve the understating of Ly α emitting galaxies. zELDA is based on line profiles of the commonly used 'shell-model' pre-computed with the full Monte Carlo radiative transfer code LyaRT. Via interpolation between these spectra and the addition of noise, we assemble a suite of realistic Ly α spectra which we use to train a deep neural network.We show that the neural network can predict the model parameters to high accuracy (e.g. ≲ 0.34 dex H I column density for R ~ 12 000) and thus allows for a significant speedup over existing fitting methods. As a proof of concept, we demonstrate the potential of zELDA by fitting 97 observed Ly α line profiles from the LASD data base. Comparing the fitted value with the measured systemic redshift of these sources, we find that Ly α determines their rest frame Ly α wavelength with a remarkable good accuracy of ~0.3 Å ($\sim 75\,\, {\rm km\, s}^{-1}$). Comparing the predicted outflow properties and the observed Ly α luminosity and equivalent width, we find several possible trends. For example, we find an anticorrelation between the Ly α luminosity and the outflow neutral hydrogen column density, which might be explained by the radiative transfer process within galaxies.

Measurements of exoplanetary orbital obliquity angles for different classes of planets are an essential tool in testing various planet formation theories. Measurements for those transiting planets on relatively large orbital periods (P > 10 d) present a rather difficult observational challenge. Here we present the obliquity measurement for the warm sub-Saturn planet HD 332231 b, which was discovered through Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite photometry of sectors 14 and 15, on a relatively large orbital period (18.7 d). Through a joint analysis of previously obtained spectroscopic data and our newly obtained CARMENES transit observations, we estimated the spin-orbit misalignment angle, λ, to be −42.0_−10.6^+11.3 deg, which challenges Laplacian ideals of planet formation. Through the addition of these new radial velocity data points obtained with CARMENES, we also derived marginal improvements on other orbital and bulk parameters for the planet, as compared to previously published values. We showed the robustness of the obliquity measurement through model comparison with an aligned orbit. Finally, we demonstrated the inability of the obtained data to probe any possible extended atmosphere of the planet, due to a lack of precision, and place the atmosphere in the context of a parameter detection space.

SN 2020cxd is a representative of the family of low-energy, underluminous Type IIP supernovae (SNe), whose observations and analysis were recently reported by Yang et al. (2021). Here we re-evaluate the observational data for the diagnostic SN properties by employing the hydrodynamic explosion model of a 9 MSun red supergiant progenitor with an iron core and a pre-collapse mass of 8.75 Msun. The explosion of the star was obtained by the neutrino-driven mechanism in a fully self-consistent simulation in three dimensions (3D). Multi-band light curves and photospheric velocities for the plateau phase are computed with the one-dimensional radiation-hydrodynamics code STELLA, applied to the spherically averaged 3D explosion model as well as spherisized radial profiles in different directions of the 3D model. We find that the overall evolution of the bolometric light curve, duration of the plateau phase, and basic properties of the multi-band emission can be well reproduced by our SN model with its explosion energy of only 0.7x10^50 erg and an ejecta mass of 7.4 Msun. These values are considerably lower than the previously reported numbers, but they are compatible with those needed to explain the fundamental observational properties of the prototype low-luminosity SN 2005cs. Because of the good compatibility of our photospheric velocities with line velocities determined for SN 2005cs, we conclude that the line velocities of SN 2020cxd are probably overestimated by up to a factor of about 3. The evolution of the line velocities of SN 2005cs compared to photospheric velocities in different explosion directions might point to intrinsic asymmetries in the SN ejecta.

Feynman diagrams constitute one of the essential ingredients for making precision predictions for collider experiments. Yet, while the simplest Feynman diagrams can be evaluated in terms of multiple polylogarithms -- whose properties as special functions are well understood -- more complex diagrams often involve integrals over complicated algebraic manifolds. Such diagrams already contribute at NNLO to the self-energy of the electron, $t \bar{t}$ production, $\gamma \gamma$ production, and Higgs decay, and appear at two loops in the planar limit of maximally supersymmetric Yang-Mills theory. This makes the study of these more complicated types of integrals of phenomenological as well as conceptual importance. In this white paper contribution to the Snowmass community planning exercise, we provide an overview of the state of research on Feynman diagrams that involve special functions beyond multiple polylogarithms, and highlight a number of research directions that constitute essential avenues for future investigation.

P-type point contact (PPC) HPGe detectors are a leading technology for rare event searches due to their excellent energy resolution, low thresholds, and multi-site event rejection capabilities. We have characterized a PPC detector's response to α particles incident on the sensitive passivated and p+ surfaces, a previously poorly-understood source of background. The detector studied is identical to those in the MAJORANADEMONSTRATOR experiment, a search for neutrinoless double-beta decay (0 ν β β ) in ⁷⁶Ge. α decays on most of the passivated surface exhibit significant energy loss due to charge trapping, with waveforms exhibiting a delayed charge recovery (DCR) signature caused by the slow collection of a fraction of the trapped charge. The DCR is found to be complementary to existing methods of α identification, reliably identifying α background events on the passivated surface of the detector. We demonstrate effective rejection of all surface α events (to within statistical uncertainty) with a loss of only 0.2% of bulk events by combining the DCR discriminator with previously-used methods. The DCR discriminator has been used to reduce the background rate in the 0 ν β β region of interest window by an order of magnitude in the MAJORANADEMONSTRATOR and will be used in the upcoming LEGEND-200 experiment.

In order to solve the time-independent three-dimensional Schrödinger equation, one can transform the time-dependent Schrödinger equation to imaginary time and use a parallelized iterative method to obtain the full three-dimensional eigen-states and eigen-values on very large lattices. In the case of the non-relativistic Schrödinger equation, there exists a publicly available code called quantumfdtd which implements this algorithm. In this paper, we (a) extend the quantumfdtd code to include the case of the relativistic Schrödinger equation and (b) add two optimized Fast Fourier Transform (FFT) based kinetic energy terms for non-relativistic cases. The new kinetic energy terms (two non-relativistic and one relativistic) are computed using the parallelized FFT-algorithm provided by the FFTW 3 library. The resulting quantumfdtd v3 code, which is publicly released with this paper, is backwards compatible with version 2, supporting explicit finite-differences schemes in addition to the new FFT-based schemes. Finally, we (c) extend the original code so that it supports arbitrary external file-based potentials and the option to project out distinct parity eigen-states from the solutions. Herein, we provide details of the quantumfdtd v3 implementation, comparisons and tests of the three new kinetic energy terms, and code documentation.

We investigate the deformations and rigidity of boundary Heisenberg-like algebras. In particular, we focus on the Heisenberg and Heisenberg ⊕ witt algebras which arise as symmetry algebras in three-dimensional gravity theories. As a result of the deformation procedure we find a large class of algebras. While some of these algebras are new, some of them have already been obtained as asymptotic and boundary symmetry algebras, supporting the idea that symmetry algebras associated to diverse boundary conditions and spacetime loci are algebraically interconnected through deformation of algebras. The deformation/contraction relationships between the new algebras are investigated. In addition, it is also shown that the deformation procedure reaches new algebras inaccessible to the Sugawara construction. As a byproduct of our analysis, we obtain that Heisenberg ⊕ witt and the asymptotic symmetry algebra Weyl-bms3 are not connected via single deformation but in a more subtle way.

We have obtained deep 1 and 3 mm spectral-line scans towards a candidate z ≳ 5 ALMA-identified AzTEC submillimetre galaxy (SMG) in the Subaru/XMM-Newton Deep Field (or UKIDSS UDS), ASXDF1100.053.1, using the NOrthern Extended Millimeter Array (NOEMA), aiming to obtain its spectroscopic redshift. ASXDF1100.053.1 is an unlensed optically dark millimetre-bright SMG with S_{1100 μm} = 3.5 mJy and K_AB > 25.7 (2σ), which was expected to lie at z = 5-7 based on its radio-submillimetre photometric redshift. Our NOEMA spectral scan detected line emission due to ¹²CO(J = 5-4) and (J = 6-5), providing a robust spectroscopic redshift, z_CO = 5.2383 ± 0.0005. Energy-coupled spectral energy distribution modelling from optical to radio wavelengths indicates an infrared luminosity L_IR = 8.3_−1.4^+1.5 × 10¹² L_⊙, a star formation rate SFR = 630₋₃₈₀⁺²⁶⁰ M_⊙ yr⁻¹, a dust mass M_d = 4.4_−0.3^+0.4 × 10⁸ M_⊙, a stellar mass M_stellar = 3.5_−1.4^+3.6 × 10¹¹ M_⊙, and a dust temperature T_d = 37.4_−1.8^+2.3 K. The CO luminosity allows us to estimate a gas mass M_gas = 3.1 ± 0.3 × 10¹⁰ M_⊙, suggesting a gas-to-dust mass ratio of around 70, fairly typical for z ∼ 2 SMGs. ASXDF1100.053.1 has ALMA continuum size R_e = 1.0_−0.1^+0.2 kpc, so its surface infrared luminosity density Σ_IR is 1.2_−0.2^+0.1 × 10¹² L_⊙ kpc⁻². These physical properties indicate that ASXDF1100.053.1 is a massive dusty star-forming galaxy with an unusually compact starburst. It lies close to the star-forming main sequence at z ∼ 5, with low M_gas/M_stellar = 0.09, SFR/SFR_MS(R_SB) = 0.6, and a gas-depletion time τ_dep of ≈50 Myr, modulo assumptions about the stellar initial mass function in such objects. ASXDF1100.053.1 has extreme values of M_gas/M_stellar, R_SB, and τ_dep compared to SMGs at z ∼ 2-4, and those of ASXDF1100.053.1 are the smallest among SMGs at z > 5. ASXDF1100.053.1 is likely a late-stage dusty starburst prior to passivisation. The number of z = 5.1-5.3 unlensed SMGs now suggests a number density dN/dz = 30.4 ± 19.0 deg⁻², barely consistent with the latest cosmological simulations.

The He I λ10833 Å triplet is a powerful tool for characterising the upper atmosphere of exoplanets and tracing possible mass loss. Here, we analysed one transit of GJ 1214 b observed with the CARMENES high-resolution spectrograph to study its atmosphere via transmission spectroscopy around the He I triplet. Although previous studies using lower resolution instruments have reported non-detections of He I in the atmosphere of GJ 1214 b, we report here the first potential detection. We reconcile the conflicting results arguing that previous transit observations did not present good opportunities for the detection of He I, due to telluric H₂O absorption and OH emission contamination. We simulated those earlier observations, and show evidence that the planetary signal was contaminated. From our single non-telluric-contaminated transit, we determined an excess absorption of 2.10_−0.50^+0.45% (4.6 σ) with a full width at half maximum (FWHM) of 1.30_−0.25^+0.30 Å. The detection of He I is statistically significant at the 4.6 σ level, but repeatability of the detection could not be confirmed due to the availability of only one transit. By applying a hydrodynamical model and assuming an H/He composition of 98/2, we found that GJ 1214 b would undergo hydrodynamic escape in the photon-limited regime, losing its primary atmosphere with a mass-loss rate of (1.5-18) × 10¹⁰ g s⁻¹ and an outflow temperature in the range of 2900-4400 K. Further high-resolution follow-up observations of GJ 1214 b are needed to confirm and fully characterise the detection of an extended atmosphere surrounding GJ 1214 b. If confirmed, this would be strong evidence that this planet has a primordial atmosphere accreted from the original planetary nebula. Despite previous intensive observations from space- and ground-based observatories, our He I excess absorption is the first tentative detection of a chemical species in the atmosphere of this benchmark sub-Neptune planet.

We construct "soft-collinear gravity", the effective field theory which describes the interaction of collinear and soft gravitons with matter (and themselves), to all orders in the soft-collinear power expansion. Despite the absence of collinear divergences in gravity at leading power, the construction exhibits remarkable similarities with soft-collinear effective theory of QCD (gauge fields). It reveals an emergent soft background gauge symmetry, which allows for a manifestly gauge-invariant representation of the interactions in terms of a soft covariant derivative, the soft Riemann tensor, and a covariant generalisation of the collinear light-cone gauge metric field. The gauge symmetries control both the unsuppressed collinear field components and the inherent inhomogeneity in λ of the invariant objects to all orders, resulting in a consistent expansion.

In this work, we consider the case of a strongly coupled dark/hidden sector, which extends the Standard Model (SM) by adding an additional non-Abelian gauge group. These extensions generally contain matter fields, much like the SM quarks, and gauge fields similar to the SM gluons. We focus on the exploration of such sectors where the dark particles are produced at the LHC through a portal and undergo rapid hadronization within the dark sector before decaying back, at least in part and potentially with sizeable lifetimes, to SM particles, giving a range of possibly spectacular signatures such as emerging or semi-visible jets. Other, non-QCD-like scenarios leading to soft unclustered energy patterns or glueballs are also discussed. After a review of the theory, existing benchmarks and constraints, this work addresses how to build consistent benchmarks from the underlying physical parameters and present new developments for the pythia Hidden Valley module, along with jet substructure studies. Finally, a series of improved search strategies is presented in order to pave the way for a better exploration of the dark showers at the LHC.

The advent of deep learning has yielded powerful tools to automatically compute gradients of computations. This is because training a neural network equates to iteratively updating its parameters using gradient descent to find the minimum of a loss function. Deep learning is then a subset of a broader paradigm; a workflow with free parameters that is end-to-end optimisable, provided one can keep track of the gradients all the way through. This work introduces neos: an example implementation following this paradigm of a fully differentiable high-energy physics workflow, capable of optimising a learnable summary statistic with respect to the expected sensitivity of an analysis. Doing this results in an optimisation process that is aware of the modelling and treatment of systematic uncertainties.