In this study, we present the development of a portable cosmic muon tracker tailored for both on-site measurements of cosmic muon flux and outreach activities. The tracker comprises two 7cm x 7cm plastic scintillators, wavelength shifting (WLS) fibers, and Hamamatsu SiPMs (S13360-2050VE). The detector utilizes plastic scintillator panels optically coupled to WLS fibers, transmitting...
We present a decision tree-based implementation of autoencoder anomaly detection. A novel algorithm is presented in which a forest of decision trees is trained only on background and used as an anomaly detector. The fwX platform is used to deploy the trained autoencoder on FPGAs within the latency and resource constraints demanded by level 1 trigger systems. Results are presented with two...
Charged Lepton Flavor Violation (cLFV) stands as a compelling frontier in the realm of particle physics, offering a unique window into the mysteries of flavor physics beyond the Standard Model. I will provide a comprehensive overview of the current experimental landscape and future prospects.
A survey of ongoing experimental efforts will be presented, highlighting recent breakthroughs and...
The lightest supersymmetric particles could be higgsinos that have a small mixing with gauginos. If the lightest higgsino-like state makes up some or all of the dark matter with a thermal freezeout density, then its mass must be between about 100 and 1150 GeV, and dark matter searches put bounds on the amount of gaugino contamination that it can have. Motivated by the generally good agreement...
Like the weak interaction itself, the Higgs coupling to the left chiral components of the Dirac bispinors for quarks "knows" which up goes with which down in the universal coupling. However, the simple conjecture that the right chiral components of each are not so distinguished provides for a consistent determination of the quark mass spectra and of
the CKM matrix relating their mass...
The search for dark matter (DM) continues, with increasingly sensitive detectors at the WIMP scale, and novel detection techniques for discovering sub-GeV DM. In this talk I highlight two types of directionally sensitive experiments, in which the DM signal can be distinguished from the low-energy backgrounds. A new, highly efficient computational method can streamline the theory predictions,...
The Mu2e experiment at Fermilab will conduct a world-leading search for Charged Lepton Flavour Violation (CLFV) in neutrino-less muon-to-electron conversion in the field of a nucleus. In doing so, it will provide a powerful probe into physics beyond the Standard Model, which can greatly enhance the rates of CLFV processes. To accomplish this measurement, which will constitute an...
The Compact Muon Solenoid (CMS) detector at the CERN LHC produces a large quantity of data that requires rapid and in-depth quality monitoring to ensure its validity for use in physics analysis. These assessments are often done by visual inspection which can be time consuming and prone to human error. In this talk, we introduce the “AutoDQM” system for Automated Data Quality Monitoring in CMS...
Upcoming cosmological surveys will probe the impact of a non-zero sum of neutrino masses on the growth of structures. These measurements are sensitive to the behavior of neutrinos at cosmic distances, making them a perfect testbed for neutrino physics beyond the standard model at long ranges. In this talk, I will introduce a novel signal from long-range self-interactions between neutrinos. In...
Cosmic ray (CR) upscattering of dark matter is one of the most straightforward mechanisms to accelerate ambient dark matter, making it detectable at high threshold, large volume experiments. In this work, we revisit CR upscattered dark matter signals at the IceCube detector, considering both proton and electron scattering, in the former case including both quasielastic and deep inelastic...
A search for ``emerging jets'' produced in proton-proton collisions at a center-of-mass energy of 13 TeV is performed using data collected by the CMS experiment corresponding to an integrated luminosity of 138 fb^-1. This search examines a hypothetical dark quantum chromodynamics (QCD) sector that couples to the standard model (SM) through a scalar mediator. The scalar mediator decays into an...
We study the physics of the intermediate scattering regime for boosted dark matter (BDM) interacting with standard model (SM) target nucleons. The phenomenon of BDM, which is consistent with many possible DM models, occurs when DM particles receive a Lorentz boost from some process. BDM would then exhibit similar behavior to neutrinos as it potentially interacts, at relativistic speeds, in...
Supersymmetry is an appealing theoretical extension of the Standard Model because this framework presents a viable dark matter candidate. Several CMS analyses have searched for evidence of supersymmetry at the electroweak scale in the compressed region, where the parent sparticle mass is close to that of the child, leading to soft Standard Model decay products that can be difficult to...
Minimal Dark Matter models extend the Standard Model by incorporating a single electroweak multiplet, with its neutral component serving as a candidate for the thermal relic dark matter in the Universe. These models predict TeV-scale particles with sub-GeV mass splittings $\Delta$. Collider searches aim at producing the charged member of the electroweak multiplet which then decays into dark...
The talk will still be about the same generalization of QM but more focused on the difference in the interference pattern of two paths in canonical QM vs. this generalization of QM. The reason for this change is that I have made much more progress in this aspect than the topic of my current abstract. As such, I believe it would be more fruitful to talk about this work as opposed to...
LYSO crystals are radiation-hard, non-hygroscopic, have a light yield of $\sim30,000\,\gamma$/MeV, a 40-ns decay time, and a radiation length of just 1.14 cm. Conventional photosensors work naturally at the LYSO peak wavelength of 420 nm. These properties suggest that an electromagnetic calorimeter made from LYSO should be ideal for high-rate, low-energy precision experiments where high...
We present R-Anode, a new method for data-driven, model-agnostic resonant anomaly detection that raises the bar for both performance and interpretability. The key to R-Anode is to enhance the inductive bias of the anomaly detection task by fitting a normalizing flow directly to the small and unknown signal component, while holding fixed a background model (also a normalizing flow) learned from...
Neutrino oscillations have shown that lepton flavor is not a conserved quantity. Charged lepton flavor violation (CLFV) is suppressed by the small neutrino masses well below what is experimentally observable, while lepton number violation (LNV) is forbidden in the SM extended to include neutrino masses. New physics models predict higher rates of CLFV and allow for LNV. The CLFV $\mu^-...
We perform a global fit of dark matter interactions with nucleons using a non-relativistic effective operator description, considering both direct detection and neutrino data. We examine the impact of combining the direct detection experiments CDMSlite, CRESST-II, CRESST-III, DarkSide-50, LUX, LZ, PandaX-II, PandaX-4T, PICO-60, SIMPLE, SuperCDMS, XENON100, and XENON1T along with neutrino data...
Charged lepton flavor violation is an unambiguous signature of New Physics. Current experimental status and future prospects from the electron-positron colliders are discussed. Discovery potential of New Physics models with charged lepton flavor violation as its experimental signature are also presented.
In this talk, we discuss the cosmological effects of a tower of neutrino states (equivalently a tower of warm dark matter ) on cosmic microwave background (CMB) and large-scale structure. For concreteness, we considered the $N$-Naturalness model which is a proposed mechanism to solve the electroweak Hierarchy problem. The model predicts a tower of neutrino states, which act as warm dark...
Anomaly detection is a promising, model-agnostic strategy to find physics beyond the Standard Model. State-of-the-art machine learning methods offer impressive performance on anomaly detection tasks, but interpretability, resource, and memory concerns motivate considering a wide range of alternatives. We explore using the 2-Wasserstein distance from optimal transport theory, both as an anomaly...
We present a calculation of QED radiative corrections to low energy electron proton scattering at next-to-leading order. This work is based on that performed previously by Maximon and Tjon which relied on the soft photon approximation for the two-photon exchange diagram. The calculations are performed assuming the finite size of the proton through electromagnetic dipole form factors and...
A search is presented for the pair-production of charginos and the production of a chargino and neutralino in a supersymmetric model where the near mass-degenerate chargino and neutralino each decay via $R$-parity-violating couplings to a Higgs boson and a charged lepton or neutrino. This analysis searches for a Higgs-lepton resonance in data corresponding to an integrated luminosity of 139...
A search is presented for the direct pair production of scalar tops, which each decay through an $R$-parity violating coupling to a charged lepton and a $b$-quark. The final state has two resonances formed by the lepton-jet pairs. Expected sensitivity will be shown for the dataset consisting of an integrated luminosity of 140 $fb^{-1}$ of proton-proton collisions at a center-of-mass energy of...
Understanding the higgs boson, both in the context of Standard Model physics and beyond-the-Standard Model hypotheses, is a key problem in modern particle physics. An increased understanding could come from the detection and analysis of pairs of higgs bosons produced at hadron colliders. While such higgs pairs have not yet been observed at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), it is likely that...
Electron-positron pair production and hadron photoproduction are the most important beam-induced backgrounds at linear electron-positron colliders. Predicting them accurately governs the design and
optimization of detectors at these machines, and ultimately their physics reach. With the proposal, adoption, and first specification of the C3 collider concept it is of primary importance to...
Lepton flavor universality (LFU) is an assumed symmetry in the Standard Model (SM). The violation of the lepton flavor universality (LFUV) would be a clear sign of physics beyond the Standard Model and has been actively searched from both small- and large-scale experiments. One of the most stringent tests for LFU comes from the precision measurements of rare decays of light mesons. In...
We show how the experiment Mu3e can improve sensitivity to light new physics by taking advantage of the angular distribution of the decay products. We also propose a new search at Mu3e for flavor violating axions through the decay mu ->3e + a which circumvents the calibration challenges which plague the mu -> e a.
We propose anti-ferromagnets as optimal targets to hunt for sub-MeV dark matter with spin-dependent interactions. These materials allow for multi-magnon emission even for very small momentum transfers, and are therefore sensitive to dark matter particles as light as the keV. We use an effective theory to compute the event rates in a simple way. Among the materials studied here, we identify...
A model based on a $U(1)_{T 3R}$ extension of the Standard Model can address the mass hierarchy between the third and the first two generations of fermions, explain thermal dark matter abundance, and the muon $g - 2$ and $R_{K^{(*)}}$ anomalies. The model contains a light scalar boson $\phi'$ and a heavy vector-like quark $\chi_u$ that can be probed at CERN's Large Hadron Collider (LHC). We...
In natural supersymmetric models defined by no worse than a part in
thirty electroweak fine-tuning, winos and binos are generically expected
to be much heavier than higgsinos. Moreover, the splitting between the
higgsinos is expected to be small, so that the visible decay products of
the heavier higgsinos are soft, rendering the higgsinos quasi-invisible
at the LHC. Within the natural...
In this talk, I will introduce ARCANE reweighting, a new Monte Carlo technique to solve the negative weights problem in collider event generation. We will see a demonstration of the technique in the generation of $(e^+ e^- \longrightarrow q\bar{q} + 1~\mathrm{jet})$ events under the MC@NLO formalism.
In this scenario, ARCANE can reduce the fraction of negative weights by redistributing the...
We present theoretical results at approximate NNLO in QCD for top-quark pair-production total cross sections and top-quark differential distributions at the LHC in the SMEFT. These approximate results are obtained by adding higher-order soft gluon corrections to the complete NLO calculations. The higher-order corrections are large, and they reduce the scale uncertainties. These improved...
We develop benchmarks for resonant di-scalar production in the generic
complex singlet scalar extension of the Standard Model (SM), which contains two new scalars. These benchmarks maximize di-scalar resonant production: $pp\rightarrow h_2 \rightarrow h_1 h_1/h_1h_3/h_3h_3$, where $h_1$ is the observed SM-like Higgs boson and $h_{2,3}$ are new scalars. The decays $h_2\rightarrow h_1h_3$ and...
The possibility of a dark sector photon that couples to standard model lepton pairs has received much theoretical interest. Dark photons with GeV scale masses could have decays with substantial branching fractions to simple decay modes such as opposite-sign muon pairs. If the dark photon originates from a heavy particle, for example a BSM Higgs, the dark photon is boosted in the lab frame (CMS...
The mystery of dark matter is one of the greatest puzzles in modern science. What is 85% of the matter, or 25% of the mass/energy, of the universe made up of? No human knows for certain. Despite mountains of evidence from astrophysics and cosmology, direct laboratory detection eludes physicists. A leading candidate to explain dark matter is the WIMP or Weakly Interacting Massive Particle, a...
The Large Hadron Collider was developed, in part, to produce and study heavy particles such as the top quark. The lifetime of the top quark is on the order of less than $10^{-24}$ seconds. Due to its short lifetime, the top quark is observed indirectly by particle detectors through the particles it decays into. A key part of reconstructing heavy particles for observation is to properly assign...
The knowledge of the Higgs potential is crucial for understanding the origin of mass and the thermal history of our Universe. We show how collider measurements and observations of stochastic gravitational wave signals can complement each other to explore the multiform scalar potential in the two Higgs doublet model. In our investigation, we analyze critical elements of the Higgs potential to...
A heavy axion avoids the quality problem and has been shown to produce interesting experimental signatures. A mirror sector has been invoked to explain how such axions can occur, often with a large hierarchy between the visible and mirror Higgs masses. I discuss a novel realization of the Twin Higgs framework that produces a heavy axion without this large hierarchy, addressing both the strong...
We study the implications of precise gauge coupling unification on supersymmetric particle masses. We argue that precise unification favors the superpartner masses that are in the range of several TeV and well beyond. We demonstrate this in the minimal supersymmetric theory with a common sparticle mass threshold, and two simple high-scale scenarios: minimal supergravity and minimal...
A search for dark matter (DM) produced in association with a resonant b$\bar{b}$ pair is performed in proton-proton collisions at a center-of-mass energy of 13 TeV collected with the CMS detector during the Run 2 of the Large Hadron Colllider. The analyzed data sample corresponds to an integrated luminosity of 137 fb$^{-1}$.
Results are interpreted in terms of a novel theoretical model of...
Dark matter, estimated to be 85% of the total mass of the Universe, remains a mystery in physics. Despite accumulating evidence supporting its existence, the true nature of dark matter is still elusive. One of the candidate's hypothesis are the Weakly Interacting Massive Particles (WIMPs). The search for WIMPs represents a real experimental challenge, has been running for more than a decade...
The Deep Underground Neutrino Experiment (DUNE) is a next-generation long-baseline neutrino oscillation experiment in the US. It will have four far detector modules, each holding 17 kilotons of liquid argon. These modules sit 1500 meters underground and 1300 kilometers from the near detector complex. In this overview talk, I will give an overview of DUNE experiment, including the status of...
We study the conditions under which the CP violation in the quark mixing matrix can leak into the scalar potential of the real two-Higgs-doublet model (2HDM) via divergent radiative corrections, thereby spoiling the renormalizability of the model. We show that any contributing diagram must involve 12 Yukawa-coupling insertions and a factor of the hard $U(1)_{PQ}$-breaking scalar potential...
We unveil blind spot regions in dark matter (DM) direct detection (DMDD), for weakly interacting massive particles with a mass around a few hundred~GeV that may reveal interesting photon signals at the LHC. We explore a scenario where the DM primarily originates from the singlet sector within the $Z_3$-symmetric Next-to-Minimal Supersymmetric Standard Model (NMSSM). A novel DMDD...
We present the basis of dimension-eight operators associated to
universal theories. We first derive a complete list of independent
dimension-eight operators formed with the Standard Model bosonic
fields characteristic of such universal new physics
scenarios. Without imposing C nor P the basis contains 175 operators
- this is, the assumption of Universality reduces the number of...
One key problem in collider physics is that of binary classification to fully reconstruct final states. Considering top quark pair production in the fully hadronic channel as an example, we explore the effectiveness of multiple variational quantum algorithms (VQAs) including quantum approximation optimization algorithm (QAOA) and its derivatives. Compared against other approaches, such as...
We have further developed the dark matter (DM) Migdal effect within semiconductors beyond the standard spin independent interaction. Ten additional non-relativistic operators are examined which motivate five unique nuclear responses within the crystal. We derive the generalized effective DM-lattice Migdal Hamiltonian and present new limits for the full list of interactions.
DUNE is the flagship of the next generation of neutrino experiments in the United States. It is designed to decisively measure neutrino CP violation and the mass hierarchy. It utilizes the Liquid Argon Time Projection Chamber (LArTPC) technology, which provides exceptional spatial resolution and the potential to accurately identify final state particles and neutrino events. DUNE's high...
The axion or axion like particle (ALP), as a leading dark matter candidate, is the target of many on-going and proposed experimental searches based on its coupling to photons. However, indirect searches for axions have not been as competitive as direct searches that can probe a large range of parameter space. In this talk, I will introduce the idea that axion stars will inevitably form in the...
We are investigating the effects of dimension 6 dipole moment operators on dipole
moment measurements, which are electric dipole moment (EDM) and magnetic dipole moment (MDM).
The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) will undergo a major improvement from 2026-2028 called High Luminosity LHC (HL-LHC). The number of collisions per proton bunch crossing will increase from ~60 to ~200. This will stress the current event selection (trigger) system, and the efficiency of specialized jet triggers in particular. An important challenge lies in classifying jets coming from a single...
Exploring additional CP violation sources at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) is vital to the Higgs physics programme beyond the Standard Model. An unexplored avenue at the LHC is a significant non-linear realization of CP violation, naturally described in non-linear Higgs Effective Field Theory (HEFT). In this talk, we will discuss constraining such interactions across a broad spectrum of...
We will present the operational status of the LHC Run 3 milliQan detector un, whose installation began last year and was completed during the 2023-4 YETS, and is being commissioned at the time of submission. We will also show any available initial results from data obtained with Run 3 LHC Collisions.
Field space geometry has been fruitful in understanding many aspects of EFT, including basis-independent criteria for distinguishing HEFT vs. SMEFT, reorganization of scattering amplitudes in covariant form, derivation of renormalization group equations and geometric soft theorem. We incorporate field space geometry in functional matching by dividing the field space into light and heavy...
The CMS detector will upgrade its tracking detector in preparation for the High Luminosity Large Hadron Collider (HL-LHC). The Phase-2 outer tracker layout will consist of 6 barrel layers in the center and 5 endcap layers. These will be composed of two different types of double-sensor modules, capable of reading out hits compatible with charged particles with transverse momentum above 2 GeV...
As nuclear recoil direct detection experiments carve out more and more dark matter parameter space in the WIMP mass range, the need for searches probing lower masses has become evident. Since lower dark matter masses lead to smaller momentum transfers, we can look to the low momentum limit of nuclear recoils: phonon excitations in crystals. Single phonon experiments promise to eventually probe...
I will introduce the general concepts of DUNE (Deep Underground Neutrino Experiment), as well as the current status of protoDUNE-VD, one of the two large-scale LArTPC-based DUNE Far Detector prototypes located at CERN. Later, I will focus on my neural network module, aiming at speeding up photon propagation process for optical simulation of protoDUNE-VD. This module is 50 ~ 100 times faster...
FASER, the ForwArd Search ExpeRiment, has successfully taken data at the LHC since the start of Run 3 in 2022. From its unique location along the beam collision axis 480 m from the ATLAS IP, FASER has set leading bounds on dark photon parameter space in the thermal target region and has world-leading sensitivity to many other models of long-lived particles. In this talk, we will give a full...
Baryon number violation is our most sensitive probe of physics beyond the Standard Model. Its realization through heavy new particles can be conveniently encoded in higher-dimensional operators that allow for a model-agnostic analysis. The unparalleled sensitivity of nuclear decays to baryon number violation makes it possible to probe effective operators of very high mass dimension, far beyond...
Ultra-light axions with weak couplings to photons are motivated extensions of the Standard Model. We perform one of the most sensitive searches to-date for the existence of these particles with the NuSTAR telescope by searching for axion production in stars in the M82 starburst galaxy and the M87 central galaxy of the Virgo cluster. This involves a sum over the full stellar populations in...
We explore the connection between the Higgs hierarchy problem and the metastability of the electroweak vacuum. Previous work has shown that metastability bounds the magnitude of the Higgs mass squared parameter in the $m_H^2 < 0$ case, realized in our universe. We argue for the first time that metastability also bounds the Higgs mass in the counterfactual $m_H^2 > 0$ case; that is,...
The constituents of dark matter are still unknown, and the viable possibilities span a very large mass range. Specific scenarios for the origin of dark matter sharpen the focus on a narrower range of masses: the natural scenario where dark matter originates from thermal contact with familiar matter in the early Universe requires the DM mass to lie within about an MeV to 100 TeV. Considerable...
The Deep Underground Neutrino Experiment (DUNE) is one of two big next generation neutrino experiments aimed at measuring neutrino properties, including the mass hierarchy, CP violating phase. The DUNE Far Detector will consist of four 17-kt modules, two of which have been prototypes at the ProtoDUNE experiment at CERN. The ProtoDUNE experiment consists of two liquid argon time projection...
Baryon Acoustic Oscillations are considered one of the most powerful cosmological probes. They are assumed to provide distance measures independent of a specific cosmological model. At the same time the obtained distances are considered agnostic with respect to other cosmological observations. However, in current measurements, the inference is done assuming parameter values of a fiducial LCDM...
Identification of high-energy neutrino point sources by IceCube is exciting for particle phenomenology, as propagation of neutrinos over large distances allows us to test properties that are hard to access. However, beyond-Standard Model effects would often show up as distortions of the energy spectrum, which makes it difficult to distinguish new physics from uncertainties in the source...
ProtoDUNE-SP was a large-scale prototype of the single phase DUNE far detector which took test beam data in Fall 2018. The beam consisted of positive pions, kaons, muons, and protons, and this data is being used to measure the various hadron-Ar interaction cross sections. These measurements will provide important constraints for the nuclear ground state, final state interaction, and secondary...
The decay of asymmetric dark matter (ADM) leads to possible neutrino signatures with an asymmetry of neutrinos and antineutrinos. In the high-energy regime, the Glashow resonant interaction $\bar{\nu}_e+e^- \rightarrow W^-$ is the only way to differentiate the antineutrino contribution in the diffuse astrophysical high-energy neutrino flux experimentally, which provides a possibility to probe...
Quantum sensing employs a rich arsenal of techniques, such as squeezing, photon counting, and entanglement assistance, to achieve unprecedented levels of sensitivity in various tasks, with wide-reaching applications in fields of fundamental physics. For instance, squeezing has been utilized to enhance the sensitivity of gravitational wave detection and expedite the hunt for exotic dark matter...
Beyond the Standard Model (BSM) Higgs with a same-flavor, opposite-charge dilepton plus Missing Transverse Energy (MET) final state are predicted by many models, including extensions of supersymmetry with an additional scalar. Such models are motivated by phenomenological issues with the Standard Model, such as the hierarchy problem, and by astrophysical observations such as the excess of...
A search for a massive resonance $X$ decaying to a pair of spin-0 bosons $\phi$ that themselves decay to pairs of photons ($\gamma$), is presented. The search is based on CERN LHC proton-proton collision data at $\sqrt{s} = 13$ TeV, collected with the CMS detector, corresponding to an integrated luminosity of 138 $\textrm{fb}^{-1}$. The analysis considers masses $m_X$ between 0.3 and 3 TeV,...
Since the landmark discovery in 2012 of the h(125) Higgs boson at the LHC, it should be a nobrainer to pursue the existence of a second Higgs doublet. We advocate, however, the general 2HDM
(g2HDM) that possesses a second set of Yukawa couplings. The extra top Yukawa coupling ρtt drives
electroweak baryogenesis (EWBG), i.e. generating Baryon Asymmetry of the Universe (B.A.U.) with...
We present work in progress on using the timing information of jet constituents to determine the production vertex of highly displaced jets formed from the decay of a long-lived particle. We also demonstrate that the same network can output a much more consistent jet time that is less sensitive to geometric effects; allowing for better exclusionary power compared to $p_T$-weighted time.
Baryon number violation is our most sensitive probe of physics beyond the Standard Model, especially through the study of nucleon decays. Angular momentum conservation requires a lepton in the final state of such decays, kinematically restricted to electrons, muons, or neutrinos. We show that operators involving tauons, which are at first sight too heavy to play a role in nucleon decays, still...
We present a search for the y+H production mode with data from the CMS experiment at the LHC using 138fb$^{-1}$ of data with sqrt(s) = 13TeV. In this analysis we target a signature of a boosted Higgs boson recoiling against a high energy photon for H->4l and H->bb final states. Effective HZγ and Hγγ anomalous couplings are considered in this work within the framework of Effective Field Theory....
Charged leptons produced by high-energy and ultrahigh-energy neutrinos have a substantial probability of emitting prompt internal bremsstrahlung $\nu_\ell + N \rightarrow \ell + X + \gamma$. This can have important consequences for neutrino detection. We discuss observable consequences at high- and ultrahigh-energy neutrino telescopes and LHC's Forward Physics Facility. Logarithmic...
The SPS Heavy Ion and Neutrino Experiment (NA61/SHINE) is a fixed-target hadron spectrometer at CERN’s Super Proton Synchrotron. It has a dedicated program to measure hadron-nucleus interactions with the goal of constraining the accelerator-based neutrino flux, which mainly originates from the not precisely known primary and secondary hadron production. NA61/SHINE’s previous measurements of...
We present the first search for "soft unclustered energy patterns" (SUEPs) described by an isotropic production of many soft particles. SUEPs are a potential signature of some Hidden Valley models invoked to explain dark matter, and which can be produced at the LHC via a heavy scalar mediator. It was previously expected that such events would be rejected by conventional collider triggers and...
Hadronization, a crucial component of event generation, is traditionally simulated using finely-tuned empirical models. While current phenomenological models have achieved significant success in simulating this process, there remain areas where they fall short of accurately describing the underlying physics. An alternative approach is machine learning-based models.
In this talk, I will...
The Deep Underground Neutrino Experiment (DUNE) is a long baseline oscillation experiment that, among its many physics goals, seeks to measure the charge-parity (CP) violating phase, $\delta_{\mathrm{CP}}$. To do so requires precise knowledge of both the neutrino and antineutrino fluxes. DUNE will achieve this via the use of both a near and far detection system. The leading source of...
The fermion mass hierarchy of the Standard Model (SM) spans many orders of magnitude and begs for a further explanation. The Froggatt-Nielsen (FN) mechanism is a popular solution which introduces an additional $U(1)$ symmetry to the SM under which SM fermions are charged. We studied the general class of FN solutions to the lepton flavor puzzle, including multiple different scenarios of...
Dark glueballs, bound states of dark gluons in a $SU(N)$ dark sector (DS), have been considered as a dark matter (DM) candidate. We study a scenario where the DS consists only of dark gluons and dominates the Universe after primordial inflation. As the Universe expands and cools down, dark gluons get confined to a set of dark glueball states; they undergo freeze-out, leaving the Universe...
Superconducting transmon qubits play a pivotal role in contemporary superconducting quantum computing systems. These nonlinear devices are typically composed of a Josephson junction shunted by a large capacitor and the bottom two energy eigenstates serve as qubits. When a qubit is placed in its excited state, it decays to its ground state with a relaxation timescale $T_1$. However, recent...
We present a search for low-mass narrow quark-antiquark resonances. This search uses data from the LHC in proton-proton collisions at a center-of-mass energy of 13 TeV, collected by the CMS detector in Run 2, and corresponds to an integrated luminosity of 136 fb^-1. The analysis strategy makes use of an initial state photon recoiling against the narrow resonance. The resulting large transverse...
New physics at the LHC may be hiding in non-standard final state configurations, particularly in cases where stringent particle identification could obscure the signal. Here we present a search for resonances in the three-photon final state where two photons are highly merged. We target the case where a heavy vector-like particle decays to a photon and a new spin-0 particle $\phi$, where...
We use publicly available data to perform a search for correlations of high-energy neutrino candidate events detected by IceCube and high-energy photons seen by the HAWC collaboration. Our search is focused on unveiling such correlations outside of the Galactic plane. This search is sensitive to correlations in the neutrino candidate and photon skymaps which would arise from a population of...
The Standard Model (SM) predicts couplings to the Higgs boson for a given mass of the Higgs boson, and experimental values different from these predictions would be strong indicators of physics beyond the SM. While Higgs decays to vector bosons and third-generation charged fermions have been established with good agreement to SM couplings, the Higgs boson coupling to charm quarks has yet to be...
The scenario of neutrino self-interactions is an interesting beyond-Standard Model possibility that is difficult to test. High energy neutrinos measured by the IceCube neutrino detector having traveled long distances present an opportunity to attempt to constrain the parameters governing neutrino self-interaction: the mediator mass and coupling constant. We have modeled neutrino production,...
Models of cosmology including dark radiation (DR) have garnered recent interest, due in part to their versatility in modifying the $\Lambda$CDM concordance model in hopes of resolving observational tensions. Equally interesting is the capacity for DR models to be constrained or detected with current and near-term cosmological data. Finally, DR models have the potential to be embedded into...
We introduce a model of dark matter (DM) where the DM is a composite of a spontaneously broken conformal field theory. We find that if the DM relic abundance is determined by freeze-out of annihilations to dilatons, where the dilatons are heavier than the DM, then the model is compatible with theoretical and experimental constraints for DM masses in the 0.1-10 GeV range. The conformal phase...
Charged lepton flavor violation arises in the Standard Model Effective Field Theory at mass dimension six. The operators that induce neutrinoless muon and tauon decays are among the best constrained and are sensitive to new-physics scales up to 10^7 GeV. An entirely different class of lepton-flavor-violating operators violates lepton flavors by two units rather than one and does not lead to...
We explore the possibility of probing (ultra)-light dark matter (DM) using Mössbauer spectroscopy technique. Due to the time-oscillating DM background, a small shift in the emitted photon energy is produced, which in turn can be tested by the absorption spectrum. As the DM induced effect (signal) depends on the distance between the Mössbauer emitter and the absorber, this allows us to probe DM...
A search for Drell Yan production of leptoquarks is performed using proton-proton collision data collected at √s = 13 TeV using the full Run-2 dataset with the CMS detector at the LHC, CERN. The data corresponds to an integrated luminosity of approximately 137 fb−1. The search spans scalar and vector leptoquarks that couple up and down quarks to electrons and muons. Dielectron and dimuon final...
Normalizing flows have proven to be state-of-the-art for fast calorimeter simulation. With access to the likelihood, these flow-based fast calorimeter surrogate models can be used for other tasks such as unsupervised anomaly detection and incident energy regression without any additional training costs.
The Higgs boson gives masses to all massive particles in the Standard Model (SM) and plays a crucial role in the theory. Studying different production and decay modes of the Higgs at the Large Hadron Collider is essential. The Vector Boson Fusion (VBF) is the second-largest production mechanism of the Higgs. Higgs bosons have the largest probability of decaying into a pair of bottom quarks,...
The QCD axion, originally motivated as a solution to the strong CP problem, is a compelling candidate for dark matter, and accordingly, the last decade has seen an explosion in new ideas to search for axions. Simultaneously, we have witnessed a revolution in quantum sensing and metrology, with the emergence of platforms enabling ever-greater measurement sensitivity. These platforms are now...
In this talk, we present the two-loop order $\mathcal{O}(\alpha\alpha_s)$ correction to the bottom quark on-shell wavefunction renormalization constant and we update the $\overline{MS}$-mass and the Yukawa coupling corrections at the same order, considering the full dependence on the top quark mass and on the bottom mass itself.
Cosmological first order phase transitions are typically associated with physics beyond the Standard Model, and thus of great theoretical and observational interest. Models of phase transitions where the energy is mostly converted to dark radiation can be constrained through limits on the dark radiation energy density (parameterized by $\Delta N_{\rm eff}$). However, the current constraint...
Non-abelian symmetries are strong contenders as solutions to the flavour puzzle that seeks to explain the mass and mixing matrices of SM fermions. The Universal Texture Zero (UTZ) model charges all quark and lepton families as triplets under the $\Delta(27)$ symmetry group, while simultaneously exploiting the seesaw mechanism to generate light neutrino masses. Together with BSM triplet...
We outline a new production mechanism for dark matter that we dub “recycling”:dark sector particles are kinematically trapped in the false vacuum during a dark phase transition; the false pockets collapse into primordial black holes (PBHs), which ultimately evaporate before Big Bang Nucleosynthesis (BBN) to reproduce the dark sector particles. The requirement that all PBHs evaporate prior to...
The ForwArd Search ExpeRiment (FASER) has been successfully acquiring data at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) since the inception of Run 3 in 2022. FASER opened the window on the new subfield of collider neutrino physics by conducting the first direct detection of muon and electron neutrinos at the LHC. In this talk, we discuss the latest neutrino physics results from FASER. A review of the...
Long-lived, charged particles are included in many beyond the standard model theories. It is possible to observe massive charged particles through unusual signatures within the CMS detector. We use data recorded during 2017-18 operations to search for signals involving anomalous ionization in the silicon tracker. Two new, enhanced methods are presented. The results are interpreted within...
The invariant mass of particle resonances is a key analysis variable for LHC physics. For analyses with di-tau final states, the direct calculation of the invariant mass is impossible because tau decays always include neutrinos, which escape detection in LHC detectors. The Missing Mass Calculator (MMC) is an algorithm used by the ATLAS Experiment to calculate the invariant mass of resonances...
Recent advancements in quantum computing have introduced new opportunities alongside classical computing, offering unique capabilities that complement traditional methods. As quantum computers operate on fundamentally different principles from classical systems, there is a growing imperative to explore their distinct computational paradigms. In this context, our research aims to explore the...
The Georgi-Machacek (GM) model is a motivated extension of the Standard Model (SM) that predicts the existence of singly and doubly charged Higgs bosons (denoted H± and H±±). Searches for these types of particles were conducted by the ATLAS collaboration at CERN with 139 fb$^{-1}$ of $\sqrt{s} = 13$ TeV $pp$ collision data (Run 2, collected between 2015 and 2018, see arXiv:2312.00420 and...
Atom interferometers and gradiometers have unique advantages in searching for various kinds of dark matter (DM). Our work focus on light DM scattering and gravitational effect from macroscopic DM in such experiments.
First we discuss sensitivities of atom interferometers to a light DM subcomponent at sub-GeV masses through decoherence and phase shift from spin-independent scatterings....
We demonstrate that the searches for dark sector particles can provide probes of reheating scenarios, focusing on the cosmic millicharge background produced in the early universe. We discuss two types of millicharge particles (mCPs): either with, or without, an accompanying dark photon. These two types of mCPs have distinct theoretical motivations and cosmological signatures. We discuss...
In a search for an exotic Higgs boson decay, a novel signature with highly collimated photons is studied where the Higgs boson decays into hypothetical light pseudoscalar particles of the form H to AA. In the highly boosted scenario, two collimated photons from the A decay are reconstructed as a single photon object, or an artificially merged photon shower. A deep learning based tagger is...
White dwarfs have long been considered as large-scale dark matter (DM) detectors. Owing to their high density and relatively large size, these objects can capture large amounts of DM, potentially producing detectable signals. In this talk, I will show how we can probe for the first time the elusive higgsino, one of the remaining supersymmetric DM candidates that is largely unconstrained, using...
Long-lived particles (LLPs) arise in many promising theories beyond the Standard Model. At the LHC, LLPs typically decay away from their initial production vertex, producing displaced and possibly delayed final state objects that give rise to non-conventional detector signatures. The development of custom reconstruction algorithms and dedicated background estimation strategies significantly...
Proton-proton collisions at the LHC generate a high-intensity collimated beam of neutrinos in the forward direction, characterized by energies of up to several TeV. The recent observation of LHC neutrinos by FASERν and SND@LHC signals that this hitherto ignored particle beam is now available for scientific inquiry. Here we quantify the impact that neutrino deep-inelastic scattering (DIS)...
I will discuss effective field theory tools and model building efforts focused on describing probeable signals of charged lepton flavor violation at current and future muon-to-electron conversion experiments.
Models of freeze-in darkmatter (DM) can incorporate baryogenesis by a straightforward extension to two or more DM particles with different masses. We study a novel realization of freeze-in baryogenesis, in which a new SU(2)-doublet vector-like fermion (VLF) couples feebly to the SM Higgs and multiple fermionic DM mass eigenstates, leading to out-of-equilibrium DM production in the early...
We present calculations of higher-order QCD corrections for the production of a heavy charged-Higgs pair ($H^+ H^−$) in the two-Higgs-doublet model at LHC energies. We calculate the NNLO soft-plus-virtual QCD corrections and the N$^3$LO soft-gluon corrections to the total and differential cross sections in single-particle-inclusive kinematics.
Project 8 is an experiment that seeks to determine the electron-weighted neutrino mass via the precise measurement of the electron energy in beta decays, with a sensitivity goal of $40\,\mathrm{meV/c}^2$. We have developed a technique called Cyclotron Radiation Emission Spectroscopy (CRES), which allows single electron detection and characterization through the measurement of cyclotron...
As we push to high precision measurements, the PDF uncertainty is often a limiting factor. To achieve improved precision, our goal is to not only ‘fit’ the PDFs, but to better understand the underlying process at the precision level. Toward this goal, we extend the QCD Parton Model analysis using a factorized nuclear structure model incorporating individual nucleons, and pairs of correlated...
HEP experiments are operated by thousands of international collaborators and serve as big drivers of frontier science and human knowledge. They provide a fertile ground to train next generation of scientists. While we invest in science, it is equally imperative that we integrate in our scientific mission, opportunities for participation and contribution from underrepresented and marginalized...
Non-perturbative dynamics of gauge theories has been notoriously difficult to study. I discuss that supersymmetry slightly broken by anomaly mediation allows us to derive many features of dynamics. They include explicit demonstration of chiral symmetry breaking as well as monopole condensation, calculation of non-perturbative condensates, correct large $N_c$ behavior, and some of the low-lying spectra.
Neutrino physics is advancing into a precision era with the construction of new experiments, particularly in the few GeV energy range. Within this energy range, neutrinos exhibit diverse interactions with nucleons and nuclei. In this talk I will delve in particular into neutrino–nucleus quasi-elastic cross sections, taking into account both standard and, for the first time, non-standard...
The “Hubble tension” refers to a disagreement between the present expansion rate of the universe, and that projected by applying our current model (“Lambda Cold Dark Matter” or Lambda-CDM) to early universe measurements; Lambda-CDM yields an expansion rate substantially different from current measurement, by more than five standard deviations. We describe the model, in particular the meaning...
A larger Planck scale during an early epoch leads to a smaller Hubble rate, which is the measure for efficiency of primordial processes. The resulting slower cosmic tempo can accommodate alternative cosmological histories. We consider this possibility in the context of extra dimensional theories, which can provide a natural setting for the scenario. If the fundamental scale of the theory...
We find a complete set of 4-point vertices in the Constructive Standard Model (CSM) by satisfying perturbative unitarity. We use these and the 3-point vertices to calculate a comprehensive set of 4-point amplitudes in the CSM. We also introduce a package to numerically calculate phase-space points for constructive amplitudes and use it to validate the 4-point amplitudes against Feynman...
Cosmological observables are particularly sensitive to key ratios of energy densities and rates, both today and at earlier epochs of the Universe. Well-known examples include the photon-to-baryon and the matter-to-radiation ratios. Equally important, though less publicized, are the ratios of pressure-supported to pressureless matter and the Thomson scattering rate to the Hubble rate around...
If science outreach is about connecting with new audiences, music remains a uniquely accessible form of outreach. However, physics music needn’t be limited to campy parodies. A project for creating music that is accessible at multiple technical levels will be presented. Using a form of 2D wavetable synthesis, a form of electronic music uses stereo audio signals, mapped onto an oscilloscope’s...
We focus on the potential of neutrino - 13C neutral current interactions in clarifying the reactor antineutrino flux around the 6 MeV region. The interactions produce 3.685 MeV photon line via the process of de-excitation of 13C in organic liquid scintillators, which can be observed in reactor neutrino experiments. We expect the future measurements of neutrino - 13C cross section in JUNO and...
MicroBooNE is Liquid Argon Time Projection Chamber (LArTPC), able to image neutrino interactions with excellent spatial resolution, enabling the identification of complex final states resulting from neutrino-nucleus interactions. MicroBooNE currently possesses the world's largest neutrino-argon scattering data set, with a number of published cross section measurements and more than thirty...
We present a very simple method for calculating the mixed Coulomb-nuclear effects in the $pp$ and $\bar{p}p$ scattering amplitudes, and illustrate the method using simple models frequently used to describe their differential cross sections at small momentum transfers. Combined with the pure Coulomb and form-factor contributions to the scattering amplitude which are known analytically from...
This talk discusses a new method to overcome common limitations in data-driven background predictions by validating the background model with synthetic data samples obtained using hemisphere mixing. These synthetic data samples allow for the validation of the extrapolation of the background model to the relevant signal region and avoid the problem of low statistical power in the most...
We describe a simple dark sector structure which, if present, has implications for the direct detection of dark matter (DM): the Dark Sink. A Dark Sink transports energy density from the DM into light dark-sector states that do not appreciably contribute to the DM density. As an example, we consider a light, neutral fermion $\psi$ which interacts solely with DM $\chi$ via the exchange of a...
With the growing precision of cosmological measurements, tensions in the determination of cosmological parameters have arisen that might be the first manifestations of physics going beyond $\Lambda$CDM. We propose a new class of interacting dark sector models, which lead to qualitatively distinct cosmological behavior, dark acoustic oscillation, which can potentially simultaneously address the...
The study of neutrino-nucleus scattering processes is important for the success of a new generation of neutrino experiments such as DUNE and T2K. Quasielastic neutrino-nucleus scattering, which yields a final state consisting of a nucleon and charged lepton, makes up a large part of the total neutrino cross-section in neutrino experiments. A significant source of uncertainty in the...
The results of a search for Higgs boson pair (HH) production in the decay channel to two bottom quarks and two W bosons using CMS data will be presented. The search is based on proton-proton collision data recorded at √s = 13 TeV center-of-mass energy during the period 2016 to 2018, corresponding to an integrated luminosity of 138 fb−1 and includes both resonant and non resonant as well as...
The COHERENT collaboration made the first measurement of coherent elastic neutrino-nucleus scattering (CEvNS) and did so by employing neutrinos produced by the Spallation Neutron Source (SNS) at Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL). The uncertainty of the neutrino flux generated from the SNS is on the order of 10% making it one of COHERENT's most dominant systematic uncertainties. To address...
In this work, we complete our CT18qed study with the neutron’s photon parton distribution function (PDF), which is essential for the nucleus scattering phenomenology. Two methods, CT18lux and CT18qed, based on the LUXqed formalism and the DGLAP evolution, respectively, to determine the neutron’s photon PDF have been presented. Various low-Q2 non-perturbative variations have been carefully...
Aside from specialized skills, physicists also have quantitative skills useful in a wide variety of contexts. Among these are the abilities to quantify uncertainty and make useful approximations. These skills, if practiced by members of the general public, can help in understanding scientific results, in understanding the progress of science, in evaluating claims from non-scientific sources,...
It is well known that in QFT, perturbative series expansions in powers of the coupling constant yield an asymptotic series. At weak coupling, this is not an issue, since the series is valid at lower orders and one can use it to make reliable predictions. However, the series fails completely at strong coupling. I will show that one can develop two different types of series expansions that are...
Phase transitions provide a useful mechanism to produce both electroweak baryogenesis (EWBG) and gravitational waves (GW). We propose a left-right symmetric model with two Higgs doublets, a left-handed doublet $H_L$ and a right-handed doublet $H_R$, and a scalar singlet $\sigma$ under a $H_L \leftrightarrow H_R$ and $\sigma \leftrightarrow -\sigma$ symmetry as discussed by Gu. We utilize a...
The simplest extension that can be added to the SM is the addition of a real singlet scalar S, which can result in a double Higgs bosson production if this new singlet is sufficiently heavy. New benchmark points are found by maximizing the production rate, which will allow to compare to the experimental results while this are being searched. The maximum values are shown for different values of...
nEXO is a planned next-generation neutrinoless double beta decay experiment, designed to be built at SNOLAB in Ontario, Canada. Within the international nuclear and astroparticle physics communities, we strive to be a leader and role model in the areas of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) while drawing inspiration from the trailblazers who came before us. In 2020 nEXO founded its...
I will present some recent progress at the intersection between machine learning and field theories, highlighting Feynman diagram methods for neural network correlators and neural scaling laws.
First, building on a correspondence between neural network ensembles and statistical field theories, I will introduce a diagrammatic framework to calculate neural network correlators in the large-width...
NOvA, a long-baseline neutrino oscillation experiment, is primarily designed to measure the muon (anti)neutrino disappearance and electron (anti)neutrino appearance. It achieves this by utilizing two functionally identical liquid scintillator detectors separated by 810 km, positioned in the off-axis Fermilab NuMI beam, with a narrow band beam centered around 2 GeV. Energetic neutral pions,...
The X(6900) resonance, originally discovered by the LHCb collaboration and later confirmed by both ATLAS and CMS experiments, has sparked broad interests in the fully-charmed tetraquark states. Relative to the mass spectra and decay properties of fully-heavy tetraquarks, our knowledge
on their production mechanism is still rather limited. In this talk, I will discuss the production of S-wave...
The Karlsruhe Tritium Neutrino (KATRIN) Experiment directly measures the neutrino mass-scale with a target sensitivity of 0.3 eV/c2 by determining the shape change in the molecular tritium beta spectrum near the endpoint. KATRIN makes this measurement by employing its Magnetic Adiabatic Collimation with Electrostatic (MAC-E) Filter process to measure the integrated energy spectrum of the betas...
Neutrino-nucleus scatterings in the detector could induce electron ionization signatures due to the Migdal effect. We derive prospects for a future detection of the Migdal effect via coherent elastic solar neutrino-nucleus scatterings in liquid xenon detectors, and discuss the irreducible background that it constitutes for the Migdal effect caused by light dark matter-nucleus scatterings....
We propose a novel framework where baryon asymmetry of the universe can arise due to forbidden decay of dark matter (DM) enabled by finite-temperature effects in the vicinity of a first order phase transition (FOPT). In order to implement this novel cogenesis mechanism, we consider the extension of the standard model by one scalar doublet $\eta$, three right handed neutrinos (RHN), all odd...
Until recently, it was widely believed that every hadron is a composite state of either three quarks or one quark and one antiquark. In the last 20 years, dozens of exotic heavy hadrons have been discovered, and yet no theoretical scheme has unveiled the general pattern. For hadrons that contain more than one heavy quark or antiquark, the Born-Oppenheimer approximation for QCD provides a...
I created a presentation, Building Inclusive Communities, and workshopped in in my classes over five years. Now, I've conducted a physics education research study to measure the impact on students' sense of belonging, scientific identity, and course performance. I will be sharing these results, as well as EDI resources for teachers, mentors, and students.
A QCD axion with a decay constant below $ 10 ^{ 11} ~{\rm GeV} $ is a strongly-motivated extension to the Standard Model, though its relic abundance from the misalignment mechanism or decay of cosmic defects is insufficient to explain the origin of dark matter. Nevertheless, such an axion may still play an important role in setting the dark matter density if it mediates a force between the...
A search is presented for pair production of higgsinos in scenarios with gauge-mediated supersymmetry breaking. Each higgsino is assumed to decay into a Higgs boson and a nearly-massless gravitino. The search targets the $b\bar{b}$ decay channel of the Higgs bosons, leading to a reconstructed final state with at least three energetic $b$-jets and missing transverse momentum. Two complementary...
The constructive method of determining amplitudes from on-shell pole structure has been shown to be promising for calculating amplitudes in a more efficient way. However, challenges have been encountered when a massless internal photon is involved in the gluing of three-point amplitudes with massive external particles. In this talk, I will describe how to use the original on-shell method,...
Neutrino-nucleus cross section measurements are needed to improve interaction modeling to enable upcoming precision oscillation measurements and searches for physics beyond the standard model. There are two methods for extracting cross sections, which rely on using either the real or nominal flux prediction for the measurement. We examine the different challenges faced by these methods, and...
In the ongoing Short-Baseline Neutrino facilities such as the Short-Baseline Near Detector (SBND), MicroBooNE and ICARUS, there exists an iron dump positioned $\sim$ 45.79 m from the Fermilab Booster Neutrino Beam (BNB)’s beryllium target. The neutrinos produced from charged pion and kaon decays can undergo up-scattering off iron nuclei resulting in the production of MeV mass scale heavy...
Double-heavy hadrons can be identified as bound states in the Born-Oppenheimer potentials for QCD. We present parameterizations of the 5 lowest Born-Oppenheimer potentials from pure $SU(3)$ lattice gauge theory as functions of the separation $r$ of the static quark and antiquark sources. The parametrizations have the correct limiting behavior at small $r$, where the potentials form...
The Coherent CAPTAIN-Mills (CCM) experiment is a 10 ton liquid argon scintillation detector located at Los Alamos National Lab studying neutrino and beyond Standard Model physics. The detector is located 23m downstream from the Lujan Facility's stopped pion source which will receive 2.25 x 10^22 POT in the ongoing 3 year run cycle. CCM is instrumented with 200 8-inch PMTs, 80% of which are...
We report on a global extraction of the 12C Longitudinal (RL) and Transverse (RT ) nuclear electromagnetic response functions from an analysis of all available electron scattering dats on carbon. The response functions are extracted for a large range of energy transfer ν, spanning the nuclear excitation, quasielastic, and ∆(1232 MeV) region, over a large range of the square of the...
We calculate the effects of a light, very weakly-coupled boson $X$ arising from a spontaneously broken $U(1)_{B-L}$ symmetry on $\Delta N_{\rm eff}$ as measured by the CMB and $Y_p$ from BBN. Our focus is the mass range $1 \; {\rm eV} \, \lesssim m_X \lesssim 100 \; {\rm MeV}$. We find $U(1)_{B-L}$ is more strongly constrained by $\Delta N_{\rm eff}$ than previously considered. While some of...
We demonstrate how the scattering amplitudes of some scalar theories, scaffolded general relativity, multi-flavor DBI, and the special Galileon, vanish at multiple loci in momentum space that include and extend their soft-limit behaviors. We elucidate the factorization of the amplitudes near the zero loci into lower point amplitudes. We explain how the occurrence of the zero loci in these...
Recently, NANOGrav collaboration (based on 12.5 years of observation) reported strong evidence [Arzoumanian et al. (2020)] and later, the analysis of 15 years of data resulted in confirming the detection of a stochastic gravitational wave background [Agazie et al. (2023)] that can be understood, along with the possibility of the astrophysical sources (such as supermassive black holes) induced...
Primordial black holes (PBHs) remain a viable dark matter candidate in the asteroid-mass range. We point out that in this scenario, the PBH abundance would be large enough for at least one object to cross through the inner Solar System per decade. Since Solar System ephemerides are modeled and measured to extremely high precision, such close encounters could produce detectable perturbations to...
Energy correlators, which as a jet-substructure observable measure correlations between energy detectors (calorimeters) in a collider experiment, have received significant attention over the last few years in both the theory/phenomenology and experimental communities. This success has prompted investigations into how energy correlators can be further used, such as in the study of both hot and...
Unravelling the mystery of neutrino masses is one of the top priorities in particle physics and tremendous model building efforts have been devoted to exploring new physics beyond the Standard Model (BSM) in order to state the puzzle succinctly. In this work, we consider a simple extension of the standard model of particle physics (SM) — a class of models called Two-Higgs Doublet Model with...
A multi-TeV muon collider has the unique potential to provide both precision measurements and the highest energy reach in one machine that cannot be paralleled by any currently available technology. There has been a strong physics interest in Muon Colliders recently, as indicated by the number of publications, workshops, Snowmass activities, and the 2023 P5 report which referred to it as...
Primordial black holes (PBHs) can be formed from the collapse of large-density inhomogeneities in the early Universe through various mechanisms. One such mechanism is a strong first-order phase transition, where PBH formation arises due to the delayed vacuum transition. The probabilistic nature of bubble nucleation implies that there is a possibility that large regions are filled by the false...
In the presence of axion dark matter, electrons experience an "axion wind" spin torque and an "axioelectric" force, which give rise to magnetization and polarization currents in common ferrite materials. The radiation produced by these currents can be amplified in multilayer setups, which are potentially sensitive to the QCD axion without requiring a large external magnetic field.
The large-scale Water-based Liquid Scintillator (WbLS) detector is a new opportunity for the neutrino community to accomplish competent long-baseline neutrino oscillation and unprecedented low-energy neutrino measurements. Several table-top WbLS detection systems have been implemented at BNL and LBNL.
It is critical to advance further with a mid-scale demonstrator to understand and tune the...
We analyse sound waves arising from a cosmic phase transition where the full velocity profile is taken into account as an explanation for the gravitational wave spectrum observed by multiple pulsar timing array groups. Unlike the broken power law used in the literature, in this scenario the power law after the peak depends on the macroscopic properties of the phase transition, allowing for a...
In the context of the left-right symmetric model, we study the interplay of the neutrinoless double beta ($0\nu\beta\beta$) decay, parity-violating Møller scattering, and high-energy colliders, resulting from the Yukawa interaction of the right-handed doubly-charged scalar to electrons, which could evade the severe constraints from charged lepton flavor violation. The half-life $\onbb$ decay...
Understanding the behaviour of heavy quarks is important for painting a coherent picture of QCD, both formally and phenomenologically, and the upcoming runs at the LHC will provide unprecedented statistics for precision measurements related to heavy flavor. A natural object for initiating these studies are Energy and Charge Correlators, which measure correlations of energy flow, along with the...
If present in the early universe, primordial black holes (PBHs) will accrete matter and emit high-energy photons, altering the statistical properties of the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB). This mechanism has been used to constrain the fraction of dark matter that is in the form of PBHs to be much smaller than unity for PBH masses well above one solar mass. Moreover, the presence of dense...
Its been demonstrated that "optimized partial dressing" (OPD) thermal mass resummation, which uses gap equation solutions inserted into the tadpole, efficiently tames finite temperature perturbation theory calculations of the effective thermal potential, without necessitating use of the high-temperature approximation. Even though it was shown that OPD has a similar scale dependence as 3D EFT...
Liquid Xenon Time Projection Chambers have dominated the search for dark matter in the form of Weakly Interacting Massive Particles. The current generation (LZ, XENONnT, and PandaX) are becoming sensitive to coherent elastic neutrino-nucleus scatters from the Boron-8 solar neutrino component of the neutrino fog. However, current limits from these detectors are still two orders of magnitude...
We demonstrate a novel mechanism for forming dark compact objects and black holes through a dissipative dark sector. Heavy dark sector particles can be responsible for an early matter dominated era before Big Bang Nucleosynthesis (BBN). Density perturbations in this epoch can grow and collapse into tiny dissipative dark matter halos, which can cool via self-interactions. Once these halos have...
We investigate the possibility of neutrinoless double beta decay $( 0 \nu \beta\beta)$ and leptogenesis within a low-scale seesaw mechanism with additional sterile neutrinos. The general effective field theory (EFT) considerations suggest that if there are experimentally observable signatures in $0 \nu \beta \beta$ decay and the lepton asymmetry generated by the right-handed neutrinos, the...
We consider a classically conformal $U(1)$ extension of the Standard Model (SM) in which the new $U(1)$ symmetry is radiatively broken via the Coleman-Weinberg mechanism, after which the $U(1)$ Higgs field $\phi$ drives electroweak symmetry breaking through a mixed quartic coupling with the SM Higgs doublet via coupling constant $\lambda_{mix}$. For $m_{\phi}$ < $\frac{m_{h}}{2}$, the coupling...
Liquid xenon (LXe) detectors are used in many experiments, including the proposed searches for dark matter and neutrinoless double-beta decay, DARWIN and nEXO. LXe scintillates in vacuum ultraviolet (VUV) region, and understanding optical properties of materials and photosensors in this region is important for maximizing sensitivity of these experiments. LIXO is a setup dedicated to such...
We introduce “power jets,” a scheme that uses the fully correlated information of the QCD power spectrum to go beyond conventional, sequential jet clustering algorithms. This affords us a kinematic reconstruction that can accurately probe the underlying hard physics of an event, even in the presence of high pile up, and subject to finite sampling.
We show that observations of primordial gravitational waves of inflationary origin can shed light into the scale of flavor violation in a flavon model. The mass hierarchy of fermions can be explained by a flavon field. If it exists, the energy density stored in oscillations of the flavon field around the minimum of its potential redshifts as matter and is expected to dominate over radiation in...
The discovery of the neutral Higgs Boson of mass 125 GeV by the ATLAS and CMS experiments in 2012 has prompted further discussions on whether extensions of the Standard Model (SM) scalar sector exist, other than the observed SM doublet. The two-Higgs-doublet model (2HDM) is one of such extensions predicting the additional doublets. This model is supported by Supersymmetry and could provide the...
We identify a new resonance, axion magnetic resonance (AMR), that can greatly enhance the conversion rate between axions and photons. A series of axion search experiments rely on converting them into photons inside a constant magnetic field background. A common bottleneck of such experiments is the conversion amplitude being suppressed by the axion mass when $m_a \gtrsim 10^{-4}~$eV. We...
Different inflation models make testable predictions that are often close to each other, and breaking this degeneracy (i.e. distinguishing different models) may then require additional observables. In this talk, we explore the minimal production of gravitational waves during reheating after inflation, arising from the minimal coupling of the inflaton to gravity. The subsequent signal shows a...
NuDot serves as a significant testbed for liquid scintillator research and development, with a primary objective of reducing one of the major challenges encountered in large-scale liquid scintillator neutrinoless double beta decay (0νββ) investigations—the solar neutrino background. Utilizing machine learning techniques and high-speed electronics, NuDot aims to showcase its capability in...
Our study presents a comprehensive analysis of baryon number violation during the electroweak phase transition (EWPT) within the framework of an extended scalar electroweak multiplet. We perform a topological classification of scalar multiplet's representation during the EWPT, identifying conditions under which monopole or sphaleron field solutions emerge, contingent upon whether their...
We constrain limits on the decay and annihilation of very heavy dark matter (VHDM) particles in the mass range of $10^{9}-10^{16}$ GeV with the aid of projected neutrino flux sensitivity of future generations of neutrino telescopes, such as GRAND and IceCube-Gen2 radio upgrade. Particularly interesting constraints are obtained from the future lunar ultralong wavelength (ULW) radio telescope,...
In collider physics, the properties of hadronic jets are often measured as a function of their lab-frame momenta. However, jet fragmentation must occur in the particular rest frame of all color-connected particles. Since this frame need not be the lab frame, the fragmentation of a jet depends on the properties of its sibling objects. This non-factorizability of jets has consequences for jet...
The Standard Model provides the best description of the known fundamental particles and their interactions to date. However, findings regarding excesses of taus show a tension between Standard Model predictions and observed data. This tension can be understood in the context of a 2HDM. In this talk, I will show the recent results of the model-independent search for charged Higgs bosons via...
The advantage of muons over electrons for a lepton collider is that one can accelerate and collide them in circular machines. Unfortunately muons are difficult to produce and have a short lifetime, and these basic issues drive most design choices for a muon collider. In particular, unlike most colliders, all the muons of a given sign in each pulse are combined into a single intense bunch. To...
Atomic Dark Matter (aDM) is a well motivated class of models which has potential to be discovered at ground based Direct Detection experiments. The class of models we consider contains a massless dark photon and two Dirac fermions with different masses and opposite dark charge (dark protons and dark electrons), which will generally interact with the Standard Model through a kinetic mixing...
Gravitational-wave (GW) signals offer unique probes into the early universe dynamics, particularly those from topological defects. We investigate a scenario involving a two-step phase transition resulting in a network of domain walls bound by cosmic strings. By introducing a period of inflation between the two phase transitions, we show that the stochastic GW signal can be greatly enhanced....
Minimal Supersymmetric Standard Model(MSSM) shortcomings in inducing a strong first-order phase transition and providing sufficient CP violation to explain the observed baryon asymmetry in the universe(BAU). In this talk, I will discuss how BAU could be generated in the context of Next-to-Minimal Supersymmetric Standard Model(NMSSM), and how strong the CP violation ingredients in NMSSM will be...
The calibration of the energy scale and resolution of jets, the collimated sprays of particles initiated by quarks and gluons, is important for many precision measurements and searches for physics beyond the standard model at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC). Currently within ATLAS, a series of calibrations is required to correct jets for effects of pileup and detector response. This results in...
I will discuss a recently proposed novel experimental setup for axion-like particle (ALP) searches. Nuclear reactors produce a copious number of photons, a fraction of which could convert into ALPs via the Primakoff process in the reactor core. The generated flux of ALPs leaves the nuclear power plant, and its passage through a region with a strong magnetic field results in efficient...
Detecting the detailed 3D topology of ionization in detectors is broadly desirable for enabling new techniques in nuclear and particle physics. One example is the directional detection of nuclear recoils from neutrinos or dark matter, which may prove critical for probing dark matter beneath the neutrino fog and affirming its galactic origin. Gaseous time projection chambers (TPCs) can enable...
Using the s-wave unitarity constraint on a general Type-1 Seesaw Model, we investigate the effects that unitarity bounds place on a general massive neutrino mixing angle, compare these new constraints against the typical analytical Type-1 mixing, and comment on how these constraints affect the available phase space for massive neutrino searches.
Muon colliders offer an exciting opportunity for high energy exploration, but the rapidly decaying beam causes challenges throughout the system. This talk will focus on detector design and machine-detector interface optimization, presenting recent developments targeting a 10 TeV collider as well as outlook for the future.
In the present work, I will discuss the so-called non-unitary effects in the neutrino mixing matrix that appear when we add more massive neutrino states. In the context of the first detection of FASER$\nu$, I studied the sensitivity to non-unitary parameters in FASER$\nu$ and FASER$\nu$2. Other phenomenology related to non-unitarity will also be discussed. This work is based on: 2309.00116
We employ a derivative expansion method to analyze the effective action within
the SU(2)-Higgs model at finite temperature. By utilizing a specific power
counting scheme, we compute gauge-invariant constraints on primordial gravi-
tational waves arising from a thermal first-order electroweak phase transition.
We then compare these results with findings from a pre-existing...
The dynamical generation of right-handed-neutrino (RHN) masses $M_N$ in the early Universe naturally entails the heavy scalar $\phi$, responsible for B-L symmetry breaking, whose decay in early universe leads to novel Gravitational Waves (GW) spectral shapes arising from the propagation of primordial tensor modes generated during inflation and that re-enter the horizon before or during an...
Plastic scintillators are common materials in sampling calorimeters. At proton-proton colliders such as the LHC, the intense radiation environment can alter their optical properties, including the index of refraction. We present measurements of the change in the index of refraction for doses between 12 and 70 kGy and show that the size of the change depends on the presence of oxygen. We do...
The ATLAS detector will be upgraded to cope with challenging new conditions at the HL-LHC. The upgrades will include extended geometric coverage and finer detector resolution. The success of the research programs at the HL-LHC will strongly rely on tracking performance. Reconstructing individual particles in the HL-LHC collision environment with thousands of charged particles being produced...
The IceCube DeepCore detector at the South Pole has been collecting GeV-scale atmospheric neutrino data for the past decade. DeepCore measures atmospheric neutrino oscillations with precision comparable to accelerator-based experiments, while also complementing accelerator measurements by probing longer distance scales and higher energies, peaking above the tau lepton production threshold. In...
Nelson–Barr models, which assume that CP is a spontaneously broken symmetry of nature, are a well-known solution to the strong CP problem with no new light degrees of freedom. Nevertheless, the spontaneous breaking of CP has dramatic implications in cosmology. It was recently shown that domain walls which form from this spontaneous breaking are exactly stable and must therefore be inflated...
We explore a variety of composite topological structures that arise from the spontaneous breaking of SO(10) to SU(3)c × U(1)em via one of its maximal subgroups SU(5) × U(1)χ, SU(4)c × SU(2)L × SU(2)R, and SU(5) × U(1)X (also known as flipped SU(5)). They include i) a network of ℤ strings which develop monopoles and turn into necklaces with the structure of ℤ2 strings, ii) dumbbells connecting...
It has recently been realized that many extensions of the Standard Model give rise to cosmological histories exhibiting extended epochs of cosmological stasis — epochs wherein the abundances of multiple energy components (such as matter, radiation, or vacuum energy) remain effectively constant despite cosmological expansion. In this talk, I shall discuss a novel realization of stasis...
Belle II is considering upgrading SuperKEKB with a polarized electron beam. The introduction of beam polarization to the experiment would significantly expand the physics program of Belle II in the electroweak, dark , and lepton flavor universality sectors. For all of these future measurements a robust method of determining the average beam polarization is required to maximize the level of...
The forward-backward asymmetry in Drell–Yan production and the effective leptonic weak mixing angle are measured using a sample of proton-proton collisions at $\sqrt{s}$ = 13 TeV collected by the CMS experiment and corresponding to an integrated luminosity of 137 fb−1. The measurement uses both dimuon and dielectron events, and is performed as a function of the dilepton’s mass and rapidity....
The recent detection of neutrinos at the LHC has ushered in a new era of multi-messenger collider physics. The Forward Physics Facility is an underground cavern that will allow the LHC to fully exploit this new capability in the HL-LHC era. The FPF will house several experiments, which will detect thousands of TeV-energy neutrinos each day, with far-reaching implications for neutrino physics,...
In October 2022, gamma-ray telescopes observed an extremely bright gamma-ray burst, GRB221009A. This event was quickly heralded as the brightest GRB of all time (BOAT) by several metrics. Followup searches for neutrino emission were also performed with the IceCube detector. In this talk, I will present the results of an analysis searching for low-energy antineutrino emission from GRB221009A in...
The ATLAS experiment is currently preparing for the High Luminosity LHC era, scheduled to begin in a few years time with the start of run 4. ATLAS will be upgraded to support at least 200 simultaneous proton-proton interactions per bunch crossing. As part of these upgrades, the trigger system is also being upgraded to support a 10x increase in readout rate, and-- for the first time-- a...
In my recent publication, Quasiclassical solutions for static quantum black holes, we derive novel nonlocal effects near the horizon of a quantum-corrected black hole. In this talk, I will outline two follow-up papers nearing submission. The first reinterprets this model as a quantum superposition of classical black hole spacetimes with a gaussian distribution of varying mass, broadening the...
Cosmological stasis is a phenomenon in which multiple energy components in the universe (such as matter, radiation, or vacuum energy) maintain constant abundances despite cosmological expansion. Such epochs have recently been shown to arise naturally in cosmologies associated with numerous extensions of the Standard Model, and can persist across many e-folds of expansion. In this talk, I...
T2K (Tokai to Kamioka) is a Japan-based long-baseline neutrino oscillation experiment designed to measure (anti)neutrino flavor oscillations. A neutrino beam peaked around 0.6 GeV is produced in Tokai and directed toward the water Cherenkov detector Super-Kamiokande, which is located 295 km away. A complex of near detectors is located at 280 m and is used to constrain the flux and...
A wide variety of celestial bodies have been considered as dark matter detectors. Which stands the best chance of delivering the discovery of dark matter? Which is the most powerful dark matter detector? We investigate a range of objects, including the Sun, Earth, Jupiter, Brown Dwarfs, White Dwarfs, Neutron Stars, Stellar populations, and Exoplanets. We quantify how different objects are...
Our objective is to address the strong CP problem by leveraging softly broken Parity invariance within the framework of the Quark-Lepton Unified (Pati-Salam) Model, where fermions undergo the "see-saw" mass generation mechanism. The incorporation of vector-like fermions facilitates the realization of this mechanism. The smallness of the Physical Theta-parameter ($\bar{\theta}$) is attributed...
The Fermilab Muon g-2 experiment aims to measure the anomalous magnetic moment of the muon, a_mu, to a precision of 140 parts per billion. Continuing to improve the precision of this measurement permits a more detailed comparison between the experimental value and theoretical prediction. The value of a_mu is extracted by measuring the precession frequency of the muon, omega_a, along with a...
Sterile neutrinos constitute one of the simplest solutions to explain the origin of neutrino masses. They can be easily produced in the hot and dense core of a core-collapse supernova (SN). Firstly, I'll revisit the SN1987A cooling bounds for dipole portal using the integrated luminosity method, which yields more reliable results than emissivity loss criterion. I'll then discuss a novel bound...
In the standard model of particle physics, the spontaneous symmetry breaking of the complex Higgs field gives rise to the massive Higgs boson and three Goldstone bosons. These Goldstone bosons give the longitudinal degree of freedom to the W and Z bosons. This analysis studies diboson polarization states, in a phase space where the longitudinal-longitudinal contribution is enhanced, with $WZ$...
We constrain the interaction cross-section between neutrinos and dark matter using the inferred dark matter density profiles of Milky Way dwarf spheroidal galaxies. Assuming $\Lambda$CDM (DM is cold, collisionless, no self-interactions), energy injection into the dark matter sub-halo is needed to transform an initially cusped profile into a cored profile. Using estimates of the core sizes from...
Recently, it has been shown that there can exist a type of cosmological epoch in which the abundances of different energy components remain essentially fixed for an extended period. This phenomenon, which is known as cosmic stasis, has been shown to arise in a variety of BSM contexts. In all previous realizations of stasis, however, the sustained transfer of energy density between energy...
Decaying sterile neutrino can mimic $\nu_\mu \to \nu_e$ oscillation signals at neutrino experiments. We revisit this possibility as a solution to the MiniBooNE and LSND puzzles in view of new data from MicroBooNE. Using MicroBooNE's search for an excess of $\nu_e$ in the Booster beam, we derive new limits in the parameter space of models where the sterile neutrino decays via mixing or...
The Mu2e experiment at Fermilab will enable the search for the neutrinoless muon to electron conversion in the field of an Al nucleus, a charged lepton flavor violating process. If observed, there would be a clear indication of physics beyond the Standard Model. Mu2e aims to reach a single event sensitivity of $3\times10^{17}$, improving from the previous limit by 4 orders of magnitude. This...
Indirect dark matter experiments probe dark matter properties by searching for the products or other observables that result from interactions, rather than measuring dark matter directly. Here we consider a two-component dark matter model where observable indirect signals are produced from lightly boosted dark matter particles produced from a more traditional dark matter candidate. In this...
FASER represents a novel experiment for LHC Run 3. The experiment, which is located 480 meters away from the ATLAS collision point and faces forward, is intended to look for neutral, weakly-interacting, and long-lived particles that go beyond the Standard Model and investigate high energy neutrinos of all flavors. FASER's most recent physics results will be discussed, as well as the...
An upgraded all silicon Inner Tracker (ITk) is under construction for the HL-LHC upgrade of the ATLAS detector. This new detector system will be required to maintain and improve tracking performance and vertex reconstruction in the high pileup environment and to handle the increased radiation expected in the HL-LHC. ITk is comprised of the silicon strip and silicon pixel detectors. The US is...
We show that in the Nelson-Barr solution to the strong CP-problem a naturally light scalar can arise. The dependence of the CKM matrix elements on this new scalar is its predominant coupling. It gives rise to a completely new phenomenology if this field constitutes dark matter, as CKM elements vary periodically in time.
Primordial black holes (PBHs) are plausible dark matter candidates that formed from the gravitational collapse of primordial density fluctuations. Current observational constraints allow asteroid-mass PBHs to account for all of the cosmological dark matter. We show that elastic scattering of a cosmological gravitational wave background, these black holes generate spectral distortions on the...
We propose an analysis to measure the branching fraction of the Z boson decaying to $b\bar{b}b\bar{b}$ at the CMS detector. This quantity was previously measured by the LEP experiments to an uncertainty of about $36\%$ but has not yet been measured at the LHC; such a measurement would be a high-precision test of QCD involving $b$-quarks. The rarity of this decay, about $4*10^{-4}$, and the...
The existence of sterile neutrinos can lead to a matter-enhanced resonance that results in a unique disappearance signature for Earth-crossing neutrinos, providing an alternative method for probing the short baseline anomalies. In order to reconcile the tension between appearance and disappearance experiments, decay mechanisms for the heavy sterile mass state have been proposed. In this talk,...
We discuss dark shower signals at the LHC from a dark QCD sector, containing GeV-scale dark pions. The portal with the Standard Model is given by the mixing of the $Z$ boson with a dark $Z^\prime$ coupled to the dark quarks. Both mass and kinetic mixings are included, but the mass mixing is the essential ingredient, as it is the only one mediating visible decays of the long-lived dark pions on...
The exploration of dark sector mediators by gravitational waves from binary inspirals has been a subject of recent interest. Dark mediators typically generate a Yukawa-like potential that either directly impacts the orbital decay through dipole radiation or indirectly through altering the effective gravitational constant. However, with the rescaling of the binary component’s mass, the...
The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) collides bunches of protons spaced 25 ns apart at a total center of momentum energy of 13.6 TeV, producing an event rate of 40 MHz. This generates about a petabyte worth of information every second, but this is far too much data to feasibly save for offline analysis. To increase the chances of saving interesting physics events, the ATLAS detector implements a...
Diboson production in association with jets is studied in the fully leptonic final states, pp → (Z/γ∗)(Z/γ∗) → 2ℓ2ℓ’, (ℓ, ℓ’ = e or μ), in proton-proton collisions at a center-of-mass energy of 13 TeV. The data sample corresponds to an integrated luminosity of 138 $\textrm{fb}^{−1}$ collected with the CMS detector at the LHC. Differential distributions and normalized differential cross...
Over the years, the Lorentz-boosted regime has become an attractive area for performing measurements and searches at the LHC. This has led to an increasing importance of boosted-jet tagging algorithms. The algorithms identifying jets originating from a massive particle decaying to b or c quark-antiquark pairs, employed in CMS Run 2 analyses, are shown in this talk. The talk summarises their...
A new form of quasiclassical space-time dynamics for constrained systems reveals how quantum effects can be derived systematically from canonical quantization of gravitational systems. These quasiclassical methods lead to additional fields, representing quantum fluctuations and higher moments, that are coupled to the classical metric components. The new fields describe nonadiabatic quantum...
Cosmological collider physics, a mechanism in which heavy particles produced during inflation leave an observable footprint in primordial non Guassianities, carries the prospect of probing physics at scales far higher than any terrestrial collider. Supersymmetric grand unified theories (SUSY GUTs) are a highly motivated target, but the high unification scale is orders of magnitude above the...
The Forward Physics Facility (FPF) is a proposed program to build an underground cavern with the space and infrastructure to support a suite of far-forward experiments at the Large Hadron Collider during the High Luminosity era (HL-LHC). The Forward Liquid Argon Experiment (FLArE) is a proposed Liquid Argon Time Projection Chamber (LArTPC) based experiment designed to detect very high-energy...
Spin correlations in top-quark pair production have been recently used to measure Entanglement at high energy. In this context, the semileptonic channel may play an important role due to its large cross section. However, the unambiguous identification of the hadronic top decay products that correlated the most with the top quark polarization is challenging. In this talk, we introduce and use...
The string theory axions can naturally form stable string-domain wall network. The later collapse of the domain walls produce more than one type of axion mass eigenstates apart from gravitational waves.
We show that Milky Way white dwarfs are excellent targets for dark matter (DM) detection. Using Fermi and H.E.S.S. Galactic center gamma-ray data, we investigate sensitivity to DM annihilating within white dwarfs into long-lived or boosted mediators and producing detectable gamma rays. Depending on the Galactic DM distribution, we set new constraints on the spin-independent scattering cross...
We investigate the $W$ boson exotic decay channel, $W \rightarrow \ell\ell\ell \nu$, at LHC. Although the decay branching ratio is suppressed by the four body final states, the large abundance of produced W boson make the compensation. After enumerating the signal and all classes of background, the Deep Neural Network (DNN) machine learning is exploited for optimization. Results indicate that...
We investigate the effects of change in temperature of thermal bath via non-adiabatic conditions on the phase transition and it's gravitational wave signature. Our preliminary results show that it is possible to get gravitational waves with shifted frequency due to the thermal kick to the bath in the early universe. This is a novel result and is ubiquitous in scenarios with non-instantaneos...
Exploring the nexus between macroscopic planetary science and Beyond Standard Model (BSM) physics offers avenues to search for novel particle signatures. One such connection involves investigating deviations in celestial object motion from well-established theories of gravity. These deviations are attributed to the influence of long-range forces mediated by new ultralight particles, referred...
The CMS Collaboration is preparing to build a new high-granularity end-cap calorimeter, the HGCAL, to be installed as a replacement end-cap calorimeter for the High Luminosity LHC era. We discuss silicon modules that will make up the electromagnetic compartment and a large fraction of the hadronic compartment of HGCAL and delve into the operations involved in assembling and testing these...
SND@LHC is a compact stand-alone experiment to perform measurements with neutrinos produced at the LHC in a hitherto unexplored pseudo-rapidity region of 7.2 < 𝜂 < 8.6, complementary to all the other experiments at the LHC. The experiment is located 480 m downstream of IP1 in the unused TI18 tunnel. The detector is composed of a hybrid system based on an 800 kg target mass of tungsten plates,...
The Earth acts as a matter potential for relic neutrinos which modifies their index of refraction from vacuum by $\delta\sim10^{-8}$. It has been argued that the refractive effects from this potential should lead to a large $\mathcal O(\sqrt\delta)$ neutrino-antineutrino asymmetry at the surface of the Earth. This result was computed by treating the Earth as flat. In this talk, I revisit...
Top quark polarization measurements provide observables that are sensitive to new physics. The down-type fermion from the W decay is the most powerful spin analyzer from top, which is not straightforward to measure in hadronic decays. Most applications measure top quark spin via an optimal hadronic spin analyzer built from kinematics. In this talk, we discuss how to improve the optimal...
In this talk we will be exploring a new paradigm where we establish a complementarity of Stochastic gravitational waves with the discovery of Neutral Heavy Lepton in the colliders.
The presence of asymmetric dark matter (ADM) in neutron star interiors has been shown to affect the global properties of neutron stars, namely their masses and radii. Since the neutron star interior is poorly understood, the most conservative approach to a Bayesian analysis of their interiors is to allow all equation of state (EoS) parameters to vary. In this work, we use synthetic neutron...
Hawking radiation emitted by a black hole is typically modified in the presence of new degrees of freedom beyond the Standard Model. In this talk I will discuss the characteristics of a hypothetical observation of a black hole in its final minutes of evaporation by current and upcoming Very/Ultra High Energy Gamma Ray telescopes, such as HAWC, LHAASO, and CTA. I will then discuss the potential...
The FORMOSA detector at the proposed Forward Physics Facility is a scintillator-based experiment designed to search for signatures of "millicharged particles" produced in the forward region of the LHC. This talk will cover the challenges and impressive sensitivity of the FORMOSA detector, expected to extend current limits by over an order of magnitude. A pathfinder experiment, the FORMOSA...
We present the results for NLO QED correction to the Neutral Current Drell-Yan process using jettiness subtraction method.
The jettiness subtraction method utilizes Soft and Collinear Effective Theory (SCET) to construct the factorization theorem and relevant ingredients for the precision calculations for various processes. While the jettiness subtraction method was originally developed for...
We propose a solution to the strong CP problem that specifically relies on massless quarks and has no light axion. The QCD color group $SU(3)_c$ is embedded into a larger, simple gauge group (grand-color) where one of the massless, colored fermions enjoys an anomalous chiral symmetry, rendering the strong CP phase unphysical. The grand-color gauge group $G_{\rm GC}$ is Higgsed down to...
The existence of relic neutrino background is a strong prediction of big bang cosmology. But because of their extremely small kinetic energy today, the direct detection of relic neutrinos remains elusive. On the other hand, we know very little about the nature of dark matter. In this work, we show that heavy dark matter (with mass in the range of $10^9$ to $10^{15}$ GeV) decaying into...
We study flavor changing neutral current decays of B and K mesons in the dark U(1)D model, with the dark photon/dark Z mass between 10 MeV and 2 GeV. Although the model provides an improved fit (compared to the standard model) to the differential decay distributions of B → K(∗)l+l−, with l = μ, e, and Bs → φμ+μ−, the allowed parameter space is ruled out by measurements of atomic parity...
In the quantum simulation of lattice gauge theories, gauge symmetry can be either fixed or encoded as a redundancy of the Hilbert space. While gauge-fixing reduces the number of qubits, keeping the gauge redundancy can provide code space to mitigate and correct quantum errors by checking and restoring Gauss's law. In this work, we consider the correctable errors for generic finite gauge groups...
Many well-motivated beyond-the-standard-model (BSM) scenarios naturally predict the production of hadronically decaying long-lived particles (LLPs) at the LHC, which leads to displaced-jet signatures. A displaced-jet search is therefore a powerful tool to address numerous long-standing puzzles in particle physics. With the Run 3 at LHC that started from 2022, we have developed and deployed a...
We derive the EFT amplitudes relevant for vector-boson pair production at the LHC in the dimension-8 SMEFT using on-shell methods. Since they are directly related to physical observables, the results allow for the identification of phenomenologically interesting amplitudes, and can furthermore distinguish between the SMEFT and generic EFTs.
In light of the recent branching fraction measurement of $B^{+}\to K^{+}\nu\bar{\nu}$-decay and its deviation from the SM expectation, we analyze the prospect of an axion-like particle (ALP) as the cause of such a departure. We assume a long-lived ALP with a mass of the order of a pion that predominantly decays to two photons. We focus on the scenario where the ALP decay length is several...
We search for indirect signals of O(keV) dark matter annihilating or decaying into O (eV) dark photons. These dark photons will be highly boosted and have decay lengths larger than the Milky Way, and can be absorbed by neutrino or dark matter experiments at a rate dependent on the photon-dark photon kinetic mixing parameter and the optical properties of the experiment. We show that current...
In this talk I will present forecasts on cosmological parameters for a CMB-HD survey. These forecasts include residual foregrounds, delensing of the acoustic peaks, and DESI BAO. We find that CMB-HD can improve constraints on the scalar spectral index, n_s, by a factor of two compared to precursor surveys. We also find that the CMB-HD constraint on N_eff can rule out light thermal particles...
The proposed Muon Collider Facility, when finalized, is going to offer great opportunities for discovering new physics. At high energies, muons can produce heavy neutral lepton (HNL), well-motivated beyond the Standard Model (SM) particles, which can potentially explain neutrino mass via seesaw mechanism. HNL can interact with the SM sector via transition magnetic moment, and in this talk, I...
The Sachdev-Ye-Kitaev (SYK) model is a fermionic model with $N$-flavors in $(0+1)$-dimensions that has holographic properties and saturates the Chaos bound in the large $N$, and low-temperature limit, where the model gains an approximate conformal symmetry. We propose an improved resource scaling $\mathcal{O}(N^5J^2t^2/\epsilon)$, and show results from noisy quantum hardware for $N=6,8$. In...
We perform a comprehensive analysis of the scattering of matter and gravitational Kaluza-Klein(KK) modes in five-dimensional gravity theories. We consider matter localized on a brane as well as in the bulk of the extra dimension for scalars, fermions and vectors respectively, and consider an arbitrary warped background. While naive power-counting suggests that there are amplitudes which grow...
Many scenarios beyond the standard model hypothesize the existence of new particles with long lifetimes. These long-lived particles (LLPs) decay significantly displaced from their initial production vertex, leading to unconventional signatures within the detector. This presentation focuses on searches with LLP decays within the CMS muon system. An innovative usage of the CMS muon detectors is...
The proposed next generation e+e- colliders provide an excellent opportunity for precision measurements of the electroweak and the Higgs sector that offer both direct and indirect probes of new physics beyond the Standard Model. These opportunities can be enabled by deploying low-mass, high granularity detectors, utilizing the latest state-of-the-art technological developments, that can offer...
A significant challenge in the detection of meV-scale rare events is demonstrating sufficiently low energy detection thresholds in order to detect recoils from light dark matter particles. Many detector concepts have been proposed to achieve this goal, which often include novel detector target media or sensor technology. A universal challenge in understanding the signals from these new...
Highly suppressed (Rare) $b$-quark processes provide an excellent probe into heavy New Physics (NP) scenarios in conjunction with stringent tests of the Standard Model (SM). Rare decays of the form $b \rightarrow s \nu \bar{\nu}$ appear in the $\Lambda_b \rightarrow \Lambda \nu \bar{\nu}$ channel, that has not yet been observed, but is a promising avenue of exploration at future $e^+e^-$...
In this talk, I will discuss how the residual five-dimensional diffeomorphism symmetries of compactified gravitational theories with a warped extra dimension imply Equivalence theorems which ensure that the scattering amplitudes of helicity-0 and helicity-1 spin-2 Kaluza-Klein states equal (to leading order in scattering energy) those of the corresponding Goldstone bosons present in the...
The primary two methods for measuring the Hubble constant – forward modeling of CMB fluctuations and distance ladder measurements – disagree at a level that is statistically significant. A third method, known as the bright standard siren method, could add another competitive measurement to the fray, potentially pointing to a resolution of the aforementioned tension. This direct method...
A search for long-lived particles decaying into an oppositely charged lepton pair, mumu, ee, emu, is presented with a requirement that candidate leptons form a vertex within the inner tracking volume of ATLAS, displaced from the primary pp interaction region. The analysis uses the 140 fb^-1 of Run II data collected at 13 TeV by the ATLAS Experiment in 2015-2018. The results of the analysis are...
I will present a detailed study of the production of dark matter in the form of a sterile neutrino via freeze-in from decays of heavy right-handed neutrinos. Our treatment accounts for thermal effects in the effective couplings, generated via neutrino mixing, of the new heavy neutrinos with the Standard Model gauge and Higgs bosons and can be applied to several low-energy fermion seesaw...
The peaks of the CMB spectra provide a direct cosmological probe for studying dark sector physics. Specifically, a shift in the peak positions corresponds to a phase shift in the acoustic oscillations of the photon-baryon plasma before recombination, which is sensitive to the propagation behavior of non-photon radiation. It has been established that CMB spectra shift to higher l-modes if the...
The amplitudes of $B\rightarrow PP$ decays, where $P$ is a pion or a kaon, are related by flavour $SU(3)$ ($SU(3)_F$). This allows us to describe all observables for these decays in terms of $SU(3)_F$ reduced matrix elements parametrized by diagrams. Using these parameters, we performed a fit to the experimental data, and found a discrepancy at the level of 3.6$\sigma$. This discrepancy can be...
We present a novel perspective on the role of inflation in the production of Dark Matter (DM). Specifically, we explore the DM production during Warm Inflation via ultraviolet Freeze-In (WIFI). We demonstrate that in a Warm Inflation (WI) setting the persistent thermal bath, sustained by the dissipative interactions with the inflaton field, can source a sizable DM abundance via the...
As the field examines a future muon collider as a possible successor to the LHC, we must consider how to fully utilize not only the high-energy particle collisions, but also any lower-energy staging facilities necessary in the R&D process. An economical and efficient possibility is to use the accelerated muon beam from either the full experiment or from cooling and acceleration tests in...
The most general massless particles allowed by Poincare' invariance are “continuous spin” particles (CSPs), a term coined by Wigner. Such particles are notable for their integer-spaced infinite tower of spin polarizations, with states of different integer (or half-integer) helicities mixing under boosts, much like the spin-states of a massive particle. The mixing under boosts is controlled by...
The initiation of a novel neutrino physics program at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) motivates studying the discovery potential of existing and proposed forward neutrino experiments. This requires resolving degeneracies between new predictions and uncertainties in modeling neutrino production in the forward kinematic region. Based on a broad selection of predictions for the parent hadron...
Most scenarios of Majorana Leptogenesis require on-shell production of heavy Majorana neutrinos, $N$ whose CP-violating decays give rise to a lepton asymmetry. This lepton asymmetry is then converted into the observed baryon asymmetry by sphalerons. In this talk, I will discuss the possibility of simultaneously generating dark and Standard Model lepton asymmetries when the universe reheats to...
Gravitational lensing of the cosmic microwave background (CMB) encodes information from the low-redshift universe. Therefore, its measurement is useful for constraining cosmological parameters that describe structure formation, e.g. matter density ($\Omega_m$), the amplitude of clustering ($\sigma_8$), and the sum of neutrino masses. In this talk, I will first present cosmological results from...
The neutrino trident process is where a neutrino scatters off nuclei and produces a lepton pair. Most trident studies have focused on electron and muon production as they represent the most likely source of trident events in the Standard Model (SM). We analyze the possibility of detecting tau leptons from SM trident processes at the DUNE near detector. The detection of tau leptons at the DUNE...
Evidence for an excess of b -> c tau nu decays, indicative of a violation of Lepton Flavor Universality (LFU), was first experimentally observed in a 2012 analysis at BaBar measuring the ratio quantities R(D()) = BF(B -> D() tau nu) / BF(B -> D(*) l nu) (l=mu,e). More results followed from the B factories supporting this anomaly, and were later joined by LHCb, which boasts a larger...
Prospects to constrain CP-odd contributions in the Higgs-strahlung process at a future electron-positron collider for the process e+e- => ZH are presented. A realistic study is performed in the framework of the FCC-ee collider at the center-of-mass energy of 240 GeV, with reconstruction of the IDEA detector performed using the DELPHES framework. A matrix-element package, MELA, is implemented...
In this talk, we look at some consequences of Majorons in the singlet Majoron model. We explore a scenario where the Majoron acts as Dark matter, while simultaneously baryon asymmetry being generated through leptogenesis, and Neutrino masses generated through type I seesaw mechanism. We explore the consequences of Majoron freeze-in production through a relatively unexplored channel of...
Color-sextet scalars have well-known renormalizable couplings to quark pairs, but they could have an array of other possible couplings to the Standard Model. This talk will focus on proposed LHC searches for two operators of mass dimension six which include these sextet scalars. The first of these operators involves color-sextet scalars in a channel with jets and a hard opposite-sign lepton...
Even if they do not comprise the dark matter, light axion-like particles may be sourced by bulk Standard Model matter through a coupling that violates CP. When considered in combination with the usual axion-photon coupling, the resulting 'monopole-dipole' scenario possesses a rich phenomenology, as has previously been studied in the context of terrestrial detection. In this talk, I discuss the...
In this talk, I would like to investigate the excellent potential of future tau neutrino experiments in probing non-standard interactions and secret interactions of neutrinos. Due to its ability identifying tau lepton, DUNE far detector could have superior sensitivity in probing the secret neutrino interactions by observing downward-going atmospheric neutrinos, compared to the short-baseline...
We show that the FCC-ee will have sensitivity to the MSSM electroweak sector that is complementary to the LHC, through the precision Z-boson measurements. Our results provide added motivation and quantitative targets for the desired systematic uncertainty on this measurement.
For many years, models of weakly interacting massive particles (WIMPs) have been a useful target for direct detection experiments and other probes of dark matter. However, increasingly precise experimental probes have severely constrained the viable parameter space for these models. In this talk, I will review a paradigmatic WIMP model, Singlet-Doublet dark matter. I will introduce the...
We study the impact of an early dark energy component (EDE) present during big bang nucleosynthesis (BBN) on the elemental abundances of deuterium (D/H), and helium ($Y_p$), as well as the effective relativistic degrees of freedom $N_{\rm eff}$. We consider a simple model of EDE that is constant up to a critical temperature. After the critical temperature, the EDE decays as either standard...
Generalized global symmetries are present in theories of particle physics, and understanding their structure can give insight into these theories and UV completions thereof. We will identify non-invertible chiral symmetries in certain flavorful Z' extensions of the Standard Model, and this will lead us to interesting nonperturbative effects in theories of gauged non-Abelian flavor. For the...
We propose a novel method using the ZZ-fusion channel and forward muon detection at high-energy muon colliders to address the challenge of the Higgs couplingwidth degeneracy. Our approach enables inclusive Higgs rate measurement to 0.75%
at 10 TeV muon collider, breaking the coupling-width degeneracy. Results indicate
the potential to refine Higgs coupling to sub-percent levels and estimate...
We present higher-order QCD corrections for the associated production of a top-antitop quark pair and a $W$ boson ($t{\bar t}W$ production). We calculate approximate NNLO (aNNLO) and approximate N$^3$LO (aN$^3$LO) cross sections, with second-order and third-order soft-gluon corrections added to the exact NLO QCD result, and we also include electroweak (EW) corrections through NLO. We compare...
The newly Upgraded Near Detector of the T2K experiment includes a novel 3D-projection tracker called Super Fine-Grained Detector (SFGD) sandwiched between two Time Projection Chambers equipped with resistive MicroMegas. The primary goal of the upgraded near detector is to reduce systematic uncertainties associated with neutrino flux and cross-section models for future studies of neutrino...
The 21-cm signal provides a novel avenue to measure the thermal state of the universe during cosmic dawn and reionization, and thus a probe of exotic energy injection such as those from decaying or annihilating dark matter (DM). These DM processes are inherently inhomogeneous: both decay and annihilation are density dependent, and furthermore the fraction of injected energy that is deposited...
The scalar and tensor fluctuations produced during inflation can be correlated, if arising from the same underlying mechanism. We investigate such correlation in the model of axion inflation, where the rolling inflaton produces quanta of a $U(1)$ gauge field which, in turn, source scalar and tensor fluctuations. We compute the primordial correlator of the curvature perturbation, $\zeta$, with...
The polarization of light from various astrophysical sources could serve as a probe of new physics, including axion-like particles (ALPs). Previously most observational and theoretical studies of such polarization signals have focused on photon energies below the MeV scale, although there are studies of the effect of ALPs on photon intensity at the GeV scale. Extending the studies of...
Entanglement is an intrinsic property of quantum mechanics and its measurement probes the current understanding of the underlying quantum nature of elementary particles at a fundamental level. A measurement of the extent of entanglement in top quark and top antiquark events produced in proton-proton collisions at a center-of-mass energy of 13 TeV is presented. The events are selected based on...
In this talk we detail how combining recent developments in flavor-tagging and novel statistical analysis techniques will allow future high energy and high statistics electron-positron colliders, such as the FCC-ee, to place phenomenologically relevant bounds on flavor violating Higgs and Z decays to quarks. As a proof of principle, we assess the FCC-ee reach for Z/h → bs, cu decays as a...
We critically examine the applicability of the effective potential within dynamical situations, as it is often used in phenomenological models, and find in short, that the answer is negative. An important caveat of the use of an effective potential in dynamical equations of motion is an explicit violation of energy conservation.
We introduce an adiabatic effective potential in a consistent...
We develop a grand unified theory of matter and forces based on the gauge symmetry $SU(5)_L\times SU(5)_R$ with parity interchanging the two factor groups. Our main motivation for such a construction is to realize a minimal GUT embedding of left-right symmetric models that provide a parity solution to the strong CP problem without the axion. We show how the gauge couplings unify with an...
The Deep Underground Neutrino Experiment (DUNE), hosted by the U.S. Department of Energy’s Fermilab, is expected to begin operations in the late 2020s. The primary physics goals of the experiment include studying neutrino oscillations, detecting and measuring the νe flux from supernova bursts, and searching for physics beyond the Standard Model. In preparation of DUNE, we are building...
Vector-like quarks (VLQs) are hypothetical particles that may lead to new physics phenomena, resolving the hierarchy problem. This talk presents a search for vector-like B quarks decaying into a top quark and a W boson, using the full CMS Run 2 proton-proton collision data at √s=13 TeV. The search targets single-lepton final states that contain one well-reconstructed muon or electron. The mass...
Understanding the dark matter distribution within a few kpc of the galactic center of the Milky Way is essential in estimating the dark matter content of the galaxy for indirect detection experiments, as well as understanding the particle nature of dark matter through the density profile in the Milky Way’s core. Although it is difficult to accurately measure the inner stellar distribution in...
The Accelerator Neutrino Neutron Interaction Experiment (ANNIE) is a 26-ton water Cherenkov experiment with the Large Area Picosecond Photodetector (LAPPD), operating on the Booster Neutrino Beamline at Fermilab. ANNIE aims to measure the neutron yield from neutrino-nucleus interactions as a function of lepton kinematics to reduce systematic uncertainties in future long baseline neutrino...
A thermal interpretation of the stochastic formalism of a slow-rolling scalar field in a de Sitter (dS) universe is given. We construct a correspondence between causal patches in the 3-dimensional space of a dS universe and particles living in an abstract space. By assuming a dual description of scalar fields and classical mechanics in the abstract space, we show that the stochastic evolution...
It is standard to treat the up, down, and strange quarks as "light" (non-perturbative), while the charm, bottom, and top quarks are considered "heavy" (perturbative). However, this is a somewhat simplistic picture. As I will argue in my talk, charm exhibits hints of significant rescattering effects, which is a sign of the importance of non-perturbative QCD. To make my point, I propose a...
Historically, dark matter searches have primarily focused on hunting for effects from two-to-two scattering. However, given that the visible universe is primarily composed of plasmas governed by collective effects, there is great potential to explore similar effects in the dark sector. Recent semi-analytic work has shown that new areas of parameter space for dark U(1) models can be probed...
Superradiance provides a unique opportunity for investigating dark sectors as well as primordial black holes (PBHs), which themselves are candidates for dark matter (DM) over a wide mass range. Using axion-like particles (ALPs) as an example, we show that line signals emerging from a superradiated ALP cloud combined with Hawking radiation from PBHs, along with microlensing observations lead to...
We study the dynamics of particle mixing induced by their coupling to a common intermediate state or decay channel, which is of broad fundamental interest within the context of CP violation and/or baryogenesis. Field mixing may also be a consequence of “portals”, connecting standard model degrees of freedom to hypothetical ones via mediator particles beyond the standard model. An effective...
The recent observation of collider neutrinos and BSM searches by the FASER collaboration highlights the potential the forward direction at the LHC has for neutrino and BSM physics. But in these studies, the dominant background comes from muons and significant effort goes into suppressing them. In this work, we describe efforts to use these “background” muons to study muon-philic particles. In...
Electroweak Precision Measurements are stringent tests of the Standard Model and sensitive probes to New Physics. Accurate studies of the Z-boson couplings to the first-generation quarks could reveal potential discrepancies between the fundamental theory and experimental data. Future e+e- colliders running at the Z pole and around the ZH threshold would be an excellent tool to perform such a...
Novel heavy vector resonances are a common prediction of theories beyond the Standard Model, and the framework of simplified models provides a phenomenological bridge between these theories and the experimental limits obtained at colliders. In this talk I will introduce a simplified model for two colorless heavy vector resonances in the singlet representation of $SU(2)_L$, with zero and unit...
The Jovian magnetic field, being the strongest and largest planetary one in the solar system, could offer us new insights into possible microscopic scale new physics, such as a non-zero mass of the Standard Model (SM) photon or a light dark photon kinetically mixing with the SM photon. We employ the immense data set from the latest Juno mission, which provides us unprecedented information...
The measurement of the charge asymmetry in top-antiquark pairs is presented using data collected by the CMS detector with proton-proton collisions and center of mass energy of 13 TeV. The full Run 2 data is used, corresponding to an integrated luminosity of 138 $fb^{-1}$. Events with exactly one lepton (an electron or muon), at least two jets and missing transverse energy are considered. The...
We construct tree-level amplitude for massive particles using on-shell recursion relations based on two classes of momentum shifts: an all-line transverse shift that deforms momentum by its transverse polarization vector, and a massive BCFW-type shift. We illustrate that these shifts allow us to correctly calculate four-point and five-point amplitudes in massive QED, without an ambiguity...
SMEFT is an efficient tool to parametrize the effect of BSM physics in a model-independent way. We study di-Higgs and tri-Higgs productions at the muon collider which is parametrized by the dimension 6 mass operator. We also study di-boson and tri-boson processes which also include the production of Goldstone bosons. We discuss possible model dependence of multi-boson processes resulting from...
We explore the possibility of probing new physics particles that scatter into visible particles at DarkQuest, such as neutrino tridents, Bethe-Heitler scattering, etc. The DarkQuest setup consists of a 120 GeV proton beam that impinges on a 5 m iron block with the detector placed 25 m away from the proton source. We find that the closeness of the detector to this high-energy proton source is...
The T2K collaboration is currently upgrading the near detector for the experiment. The upgraded near detector include the Super Fine Grained Detector (SuperFGD) which is a 3D scintillator tracker and serves as the primary target for neutrino interactions. The SuperFGD is sandwiched by two time-projection chambers (HA-TPC) and the three detectors are then enclosed by time-of-flight detectors...
Observations of stellar populations are biased by extinction from foreground dust. By solving the equilibrium collisionless Boltzmann equation using machine learning techniques, one can estimate the unbiased phase space density of an equilibrated stellar population and the underlying gravitational potential. Using a normalizing flow-based estimate for the phase space density of stars measured...
The interplay between cosmology and strongly coupled dynamics can yield transient features that vanish at late times of cosmic evolution, but which may leave behind phenomenological signatures in the spectrum of primordial fluctuations and cosmological observables. Of particular interest are strongly coupled extensions of the standard model featuring approximate conformal invariance. In flat...
We show in a very general setup that the linear entropy for the entanglement of a final state, resulting from a quantum 2 to 2 scattering of unentangled initial states in the plane wave limit, is twice of the scattering probability for certain outcomes. In particular, the entropy can be expressed as proportional to some scattering cross section, divided by an area that characterizes the spread...
A significant excess of gamma-rays has been detected by the Fermi-LAT space telescope in the direction of the Galactic center, yet its origin remains uncertain. The Galactic center excess (GCE) can be explained as a signal of annihilating dark matter or emissions from point sources such as unresolved millisecond pulsars. In principle, these hypotheses can be distinguished with likelihood based...
It is known that kaon CP-violation could manifest itself in decays into neutral kaons. In particular, the CP asymmetry in $\tau\rightarrow \pi K_s \nu$ had been searched for. In this work we discuss how the measured time integrated CP asymmetry depends on the experimental detection efficiency as a function of the energy and the decay time of the kaon. We show that such dependencies of the...
The Deep Underground Neutrino Experiment (DUNE) is a next-generation long-baseline neutrino experiment currently under construction in the US. The experiment consists of a broadband neutrino beam from Fermilab to the Sanford Underground Research Facility (SURF) in Lead, South Dakota, a high-precision near detector, and a large liquid argon time-projection chamber (LArTPC) far detector. The...
The study of Higgs boson production at large transverse momentum is one of the new frontiers for the LHC Higgs physics program. This talk will present the first measurement of Higgs boson production in association with a vector boson in the full hadronic qqbb final state using data recored by the ATLAS detector at the LHC in pp collision at 13 TeV and corresponding to an integrated luminosity...
If enough primordial black holes (PBH) are produced in the early Universe, they can come to dominate its energy density. This is usually considered viable as long as the PBHs evaporate and reheat the universe above the temperature needed for Big Bang nucleosynthesis, which requires $m_\mathrm{BH} \lesssim 10^9$ g. However, during this period of early matter domination, perturbations can grow...
I examine one-loop corrections from small-scale curvature perturbations to the superhorizon-limit ones in single-field inflation models, which have recently caused controversy. I consider the case where the Universe experiences transitions of slow-roll (SR) → intermediate period → SR. The intermediate period can be an ultra-slow-roll period or a resonant amplification period, either of which...
Double Higgs production plays a crucial role in assessing the Higgs self-coupling (trilinear Higgs coupling), which is responsible for endowing elementary particles with mass and shaping the Higgs potential. Measuring the trilinear Higgs coupling at proton colliders necessitates high luminosity due to the rarity of processes involving it in the Standard Model. Nonetheless, muon colliders offer...
Experiments conducted in the late 1950s and early 1960s provided compelling evidence that pions and kaons possess directional properties, challenging their traditional classification as pseudoscalar particles. In particular, four of these experiments, performed by four distinct research groups, each reported deviations exceeding five standard deviations from the expected result for...
We examine the possibility of using muon colliders to make complementary measurements if a non-zero electron EDM is observed in future experiments. All particles that couple to electroweak gauge bosons and the Higgs will contribute to leptonic EDMs through Barr-Zee diagrams, at the 2-loop level. These diagrams have analogous contributions to vector boson fusion present at muon colliders. We...
We revisit the behavior of neutron interpolating currents under singlet chiral rotations and show that not all interpolating currents are good for calculating chirality-sensitive quantities. In particular, for the $\theta$-induced neutron EDM, we show that the $\beta=1$ and $\beta=-1$ current give physical answers that only depend on $\bar{\theta}=\theta_m+\theta_G$ after removing an overall...
Long-baseline neutrino oscillation experiments rely on detailed models of neutrino interactions on nuclei. These models constitute an important source of systematic uncertainty, partially because detectors to date have been blind to final state neutrons. Three-dimensional projection scintillator trackers comprise components of the near detector of the next generation long-baseline neutrino...
Monte Carlo event generators that simulate particle-particle collisions are an integral part of high-energy particle and nuclear physics. Physics processes implemented in the aforementioned event generators often include multiple parameters which are turned to experimental measurements. While the global tuning of the $\texttt{Herwig7}$ Monte Carlo event generator is in good agreement with data...
Axions are favored as a possible dark matter candidate. They can be produced in large quantities in stellar environments and have non-trivial effects on stellar evolution. Cepheid variables are particularly sensitive to axion production: the Cepheid blue loop stages can be eliminated if the axion coupling to Standard Model particles is strong enough and axions are produced copiously. This has...
We study the link between low-scale CP-violating Dirac phase $(\delta)$ and high-scale leptogenesis in a Left-Right Symmetric Model (LRSM) with scalar bidoublet and doublets. The model's fermion sector includes one sterile neutrino $(S_L)$ for each generation, resulting in a double seesaw mechanism in the neutral fermion mass matrix. The double seesaw is achieved by implementing the type-I...
Cosmic microwave background anisotropies have proven to be the most powerful probe of non-trivial topology of the Universe. Within ΛCDM, these anisotropies have well-characterized statistical properties, the signal is principally from a thin spherical shell centered on the observer (the last scattering surface). The most generic signature of cosmic topology in the microwave background is pairs...
We demonstrate that the searches for dark sector particles can provide probes of reheating scenarios, focusing on the cosmic millicharge background produced in the early universe. We discuss two types of millicharge particles (mCPs): either with, or without, an accompanying dark photon. These two types of mCPs have distinct theoretical motivations and cosmological signatures. We discuss...
There is strong evidence for dark matter in a variety of astrophysical observations. A new as yet unknown particle is a leading candidate for dark matter. This talk will review searches for the production of a dark matter particle or potential dark matter mediators in accelerator experiments. Indirect searches in astrophysical annihilation will also be addressed.
A study is performed to look for signals of a strongly coupled dark sector. Many dark matter experiments have searched for weakly interacting particles without success. Hidden valley models with a strongly coupled dark sector can offer an alternative dark matter candidate, and may have evaded previous searches. We consider such a dark-QCD sector with a Standard Model Higgs mediator....
Recent advances in quantum sensors, including atomic clocks, enable searches for a broad range of dark matter candidates. The question of the dark matter distribution in the Solar system critically affects the reach of dark matter direct detection experiments. Partly motivated by the NASA Deep Space Atomic Clock (DSAC), we show that space quantum sensors present new opportunities for...
Leptogenesis can provide solutions to the baryon asymmetry of the Universe (BAU) and explain the origin of mass for SM neutrinos. In the framework of conventional thermal leptogenesis, a major obstacle arises from the strong washout effects. The final BAU is a competition between the asymmetric decay of right-handed neutrinos (RHNs) and the washout of the existing asymmetry. In this talk, I...
We derive new constraints on axion-like particles (ALPs) using precision $X$-ray polarization studies of magnetars. Specifically, we use the first detection of polarized $X$-rays from the magnetars 4U 0142+61 and 1RXS J170849.0-400910 by the Imaging $X$-ray Polarimetry Explorer (IXPE) to place bounds on the product of the ALP-photon and ALP-nucleon couplings, $g_{a\gamma}g_{aN}$, with...
We study non-composite dark matter as a beyond the Standard Model (BSM) extension under the Higgs Effective Field Theory (HEFT) framework, which describes necessarily non-linearly realised theories perturbed around the ground state after electroweak symmetry breaking (EWSB). We focus on scalar Loryon models that acquire more than half the particle's mass from the Higgs mechanism and found four...
The instantaneous luminosity of the Large Hadron Collider at CERN will be increased by about a factor of five with respect to the design value by undergoing an extensive upgrade program over the coming decade. The largest phase-1 upgrade project for the ATLAS Muon System was the replacement of the first station in the forward regions with the New Small Wheels (NSWs) which took place during the...
Doubly charged Higgs-like particles (H++ and H--) are predicted in a variety of BSM models which include the Drell-Yan-like production mechanism, q qbar -> Z/gamma* -> H++ H--. Each doubly charged Higgs can decay to a pair of same-sign standard model leptons, producing events with distinctive signatures including electrons, muons, and taus. The most stringent experimental lower bound on the...
We have reconsidered the possible new physics (NP) scenarios in the $\bar{B}\to D(D^*) \ell^-\bar{\nu}_{\ell}$ decays in light of the recent LHCb result on $R_{D^*}$ = $\frac{\Gamma(\bar{B}\to D^{*}\tau^-\bar{\nu}_{\tau})}{\Gamma(\bar{B}\to D^{*}\ell^-\bar{\nu}_{\ell})}$ ($l \in e, \mu$). The contribution from NP could be of minimal flavor violating (MFV) type which leads to similar effects in...
We describe a simple dark sector structure which, if present, has implications for the direct detection of dark matter (DM): the Dark Sink. A Dark Sink transports energy density from the DM into light dark-sector states that do not appreciably contribute to the DM density. As an example, we consider a light, neutral fermion $\psi$ which interacts solely with DM $\chi$ via the exchange of a...
Ultralight spin-1 particles can constitute all of dark matter and leave their signature as a coherent, oscillatory signal in terrestrial quantum detectors. Leveraging advancements in quantum metrology, these sensors are well-poised to measure these signals due to their incredible sensitivity to tiny forces and displacements. However, a statistical frequency-space analysis of this signal...
