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Search indexed NASA NTRS and DOE OSTI research on propulsion, heat transfer, battery materials and energy systems. Follow report and document links to the original sources.

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At least 91 records · Page 5
All sourcesNASA NTRSDOE OSTI
DOE OSTI2025

TCC in the interior of moduli space and its implications for the string landscape and cosmology

We consider the classical Friedmann-Robertson-Walker solutions that describe a universe undergoing a transition from an accelerating expansion phase in the past to an eternal decelerating expansion phase in the future, driven by a scalar field evolving in a potential energy landscape. We show that any solution for which the accelerating phase violates the Trans-Planckian Censorship Conjecture (TCC), even in the interior of moduli space, never approaches the asymptotic vacuum with zero particles. Based on the assumption that the effective field theory must be valid for the vacuum on the asymptotic boundary, as motivated by holography and string theory, we argue that (multi-field) scalar potentials with such solutions are disallowed, thus strengthening the case for TCC. In particular, assuming the regularity of the future vacuum state in the string landscape, we derive results that imply a new set of highly-nonlinear constraints across the string landscape which in the absence of certain meta-stable vacua make realizing inflation impossible.

Cosmological models↗
DOE OSTI2025

Quantum Mechanics of a Spherically Symmetric Causal Diamond in Minkowski Spacetime

We construct the phase space of a spherically symmetric causal diamond in ( d + 2 )-dimensional Minkowski spacetime. Utilizing the covariant phase space formalism, we identify the relevant degrees of freedom that localize to the d -dimensional bifurcate horizon and, upon canonical quantization, determine their commutators. On this phase space, we find two Iyer-Wald charges. The first of these charges, proportional to the area of the causal diamond, is responsible for shifting the null time along the horizon and has been well documented in the literature. The second charge is much less understood, being integrable for d ≥ 2 only if we allow for field-dependent diffeomorphisms and is responsible for changing the size of the causal diamond. Published by the American Physical Society 2025

72 PHYSICS OF ELEMENTARY PARTICLES AND FIELDS↗
DOE OSTI2024

Monsoonal MCS Initiation, Rainfall, and Diurnal Gravity Waves over the Bay of Bengal: Observation and a Linear Model

Abstract Previous observational studies have indicated that mesoscale convective systems (MCSs) contribute the majority of precipitation over the Bay of Bengal (BoB) during the summer monsoon season, yet their initiation and propagation remain incompletely understood. To fill this knowledge gap, we conducted a comprehensive study using a combination of 20-yr satellite observations, MCS tracking, reanalysis data, and a theoretical linear model. Satellite observations reveal clear diurnal propagation signals of MCS initiation frequency and rainfall from the west coast of the BoB toward the central BoB, with the MCS rainfall propagating slightly slower than the MCS initiation frequency. Global reanalysis data indicate a strong association between the offshore-propagating MCS initiation frequency/rainfall and diurnal low-level wind perturbations, implying the potential role of gravity waves. To verify the hypothesis, we developed a 2D linear model that can be driven by realistic meteorological fields from reanalysis. The linear model realistically reproduces the characteristics of offshore-propagating diurnal wind perturbations. The wind perturbations, as well as the offshore propagation signals of MCS initiation frequency and rainfall, are associated with diurnal gravity waves emitted from the coastal regions, which in turn are caused by the diurnal land–sea thermal contrast. The ambient wind speed and vertical wind shear play crucial roles in modulating the timing, propagation, and amplitude of diurnal gravity waves. Using the linear model and satellite observations, we further show that the stronger monsoonal flows lead to faster offshore propagation of diurnal gravity waves, which subsequently control the offshore propagation signals of MCS initiation and rainfall. Significance Statement Rainfall over the Bay of Bengal (BoB) is primarily contributed by large and organized rainfall systems in the summer monsoon season. During this season, these systems are commonly observed over the east coast of India around midnight, the western BoB in the morning, and the central BoB in the afternoon. This eastward rainfall propagation is confirmed by observations, reanalysis data, and a theoretical model to have a strong association with atmospheric diurnal gravity waves. These waves are caused by land–sea thermal contrast and can trigger rainfall systems over the offshore regions. We also found that the diurnal gravity waves, as well as their triggered rainfall systems, can be greatly modulated by the large-scale monsoonal flows. All the above findings improve our understanding of diurnal rainfall cycle over the BoB and may contribute to the future improvement of rainfall forecast over the region.

Meteorology & Atmospheric Sciences↗
DOE OSTI2025

Holography vs. Scale Separation

In this work, we point out a contradiction between holography and scale-separated AdS (i.e. parametrically large mass gap) in string theory, making the standard assumption that the holographic CFT describes the IR degrees of freedom on a brane that decouple from gravity. We show that the CFT can only decouple from gravity if the scalar potential in the dual AdS satisfies a certain criterion. Namely, there must exist a scalar field trajectory that follows the gradient of the scalar potential to the asymptotic region of the scalar field space in which limit $\partial_ϕ\ln(V)\partial_ϕ\ln(Λ_s)\leq2/(d-2)$, where $Λ_s$ is the quantum gravity cut-off. This condition, which generically implies lack of scale-separation, is satisfied in the standard examples of AdS/CFT. However, proposed attempts at achieving scale separation, such as DGKT, employ scalar potentials that violate this condition. We therefore conclude that the CFT duals of DGKT vacua cannot exist in string theory. Barring fine-tuning, our conclusions apply to other Ricci-flat flux compactifications including the KKLT scenario which relies on scale separation to obtain a metastable de Sitter uplift.

FOS: Physical sciences↗
DOE OSTI2025

Generalized framework for likelihood-based field-level inference of growth rate from velocity and density fields

Measuring the growth rate of large-scale structures ( f ) as a function of redshift has the potential to break degeneracies between modified gravity and dark energy models, when combined with expansion-rate probes. Direct estimates of peculiar velocities of galaxies have attracted interest as a means of estimating fσ 8 . In particular, field-level methods can be used to fit the field nuisance parameter along with cosmological parameters simultaneously. This article aims to provide the community with a unified framework for the theoretical modeling of the likelihood-based field-level inference by performing fast field covariance calculations for velocity and density fields. Our purpose is to lay the foundations for a nonlinear extension of the likelihood-based method at the field level. We have developed a generalized framework, implemented in the dedicated software flip to perform a likelihood-based inference of fσ 8 . We derived a new field covariance model, which includes wide-angle corrections. We also included the models previously described in the literature inside our framework. We compared their performance against ours, and we validated our model by comparing it with the two-point statistics of a recent N-body simulation. The tests we performed have allowed us to validate our software and determine the appropriate wavenumber range to integrate our covariance model and its validity in terms of separation. Our framework allows for a wider wavenumber coverage to be used in our calculations than in previous works, which is particularly interesting for nonlinear model extensions. Finally, our generalized framework allows us to efficiently perform a survey geometry-dependent Fisher forecast of the fσ 8 parameter. We show that the Fisher forecast method we developed gives an error bar that is 30% closer to a full likelihood-based estimation than a standard volume Fisher forecast.

Ravoux, Corentin↗
DOE OSTI2024

Kaluza-Klein graviton freeze-in and big bang nucleosynthesis

In models featuring extra spatial dimensions, particle collisions in the early Universe can produce Kaluza-Klein gravitons. Such particles will later decay, potentially impacting the process of big bang nucleosynthesis. In this paper, we consider scenarios in which gravity is free to propagate throughout n flat, compactified extra dimensions, while the fields of the Standard Model are confined to a ( 3 + 1 )-dimensional brane. We calculate the production and decay rates of the states that make up the Kaluza-Klein graviton tower and determine the evolution of their abundances in the early Universe. We then go on to evaluate the impact of these decays on the resulting light element abundances. We identify significant regions of previously unexplored parameter space that are inconsistent with measurements of the primordial helium and deuterium abundances. In particular, we find that for the case of one extra dimension (two extra dimensions), the fundamental scale of gravity must be M ⋆ ≳ 2 × 10 13 GeV ( M ⋆ ≳ 1 0 10 GeV ) unless the temperature of the early Universe was never greater than T ∼ 2 TeV ( T ∼ 1 GeV ). For larger values of n , these constraints are less stringent. For the case of n = 6 , for example, our analysis excludes all values of M ⋆ less than ∼ 10 6 GeV , unless the temperature of the Universe was never greater than T ∼ 3 TeV . The results presented here severely limit the possibility that black holes were efficiently produced through particle collisions in the early Universe’s thermal bath. Published by the American Physical Society 2024

72 PHYSICS OF ELEMENTARY PARTICLES AND FIELDS↗
DOE OSTI2024

A Goldstone boson equivalence for inflation

The effective field theory of single-field inflation characterizes the inflationary epoch in terms of a pattern of symmetry breaking. An operator acquires a time-dependent vacuum expectation value, defining a preferred spatial slicing. In the absence of dynamical gravity, the fluctuations around the time-dependent background are described by the Goldstone boson associated with this symmetry breaking process. With gravity, the Goldstone is eaten by the metric, becoming the scalar metric fluctuation. In this paper, we will show that in general single-field inflation, the statistics of scalar metric fluctuations are given by the statistics of this Goldstone boson decoupled from gravity up to corrections that are controlled as an expansion in slow-roll parameters. This even holds in the presence of additional parameters, like the speed of sound, that naively enhance the impact of the gravitational terms. In the process, we derive expressions for leading and sub-leading gravitational corrections to all-orders in the Goldstone boson.

72 PHYSICS OF ELEMENTARY PARTICLES AND FIELDS↗
DOE OSTI2026

Oscillatory and Collective Dynamics of Gold‐Nanoparticle‐Laden Droplets Driven by Photothermal‐Induced Thermocapillarity

Droplets have long intrigued researchers due to their ability to exhibit complex and fascinating behavior when subjected to external stimuli. Here, a coupled oscillatory behavior of gold-nanoparticle-surfactant-laden aqueous droplets is investigated at an oil-oil interface stimulated by light. This study shows that the interaction between light and the droplets gives rise to a range of oscillatory modes, including bouncing and clustering, where droplets exhibit collective movement. From experiment and numerical simulations, this study elucidates the underlying mechanism: upon laser irradiation, gold nanoparticles convert light into heat, generating asymmetric thermal gradients that drive upward thermocapillary flows and a hydrodynamic force from photothermal convection. These forces compete with gravity and buoyancy to induce droplet bouncing, while the resulting asymmetric flow fields bias neighboring droplets toward the illuminated droplet, leading to clustering. These findings not only expand the library of dynamic droplet behavior but also offer insights into the potential applications of light-driven systems in materials science, soft robotics, and microfluidics.

Marangoni effect↗
DOE OSTI2024

Rindler fluids from gravitational shockwaves

We study a correspondence between gravitational shockwave geometry and its fluid description near a Rindler horizon in Minkowski spacetime. Utilizing the Petrov classification that describes algebraic symmetries for Lorentzian spaces, we establish an explicit mapping between a potential fluid and the shockwave metric perturbation, where the Einstein equation for the shockwave geometry is equivalent to the incompressibility condition of the fluid, augmented by a shockwave source. Then we consider an Ansatz of a stochastic quantum source for the potential fluid, which has the physical interpretation of shockwaves created by vacuum energy fluctuations. Under such circumstance, the Einstein equation, or equivalently, the incompressibility condition for the fluid, becomes a stochastic differential equation. By smearing the quantum source on a stretched horizon in a Lorentz invariant manner with a Planckian width (similarly to the membrane paradigm), we integrate fluctuations near the Rindler horizon to find an accumulated effect of the variance in the round-trip time of a photon traversing the horizon of a causal diamond.

72 PHYSICS OF ELEMENTARY PARTICLES AND FIELDS↗
DOE OSTI2024

Coherent spin states and emergent de Sitter quasinormal modes

As a toy model for the microscopic description of matter in de Sitter space, we consider a Hamiltonian acting on the spin-j representation of SU(2). This is a model with a finite-dimensional Hilbert space, from which quasinormal modes emerge in the large-spin limit. The path integral over coherent spin states can be evaluated at the semiclassical level and from it we find the single-particle de Sitter density of states, including 1/j corrections. Along the way, we discuss the use of quasinormal modes in quantum mechanics, starting from the paradigmatic upside-down harmonic oscillator.

72 PHYSICS OF ELEMENTARY PARTICLES AND FIELDS↗
DOE OSTI2024

Soft algebras for leaf amplitudes

Celestial MHV amplitudes are comprised of non-distributional leaf amplitudes associated to an AdS3 leaf of a foliation of flat spacetime. It is shown here that the leaf amplitudes are governed by the same infinite-dimensional soft ‘S-algebra’ as their celestial counterparts. Moreover, taking the soft limit of the smooth three-point MHV leaf amplitude yields a nondegenerate minus-minus two-point leaf amplitude. The two- and three-point MHV leaf amplitudes are used to compute the plus-minus-minus leaf operator product coefficients.

79 ASTRONOMY AND ASTROPHYSICS↗
DOE OSTI2024

Celestial leaf amplitudes

Celestial amplitudes may be decomposed as weighted integrals of AdS 3 -Witten diagrams associated to each leaf of a hyperbolic foliation of spacetime. We show, for the Kleinian three-point MHV amplitude, that each leaf subamplitude is smooth except for the expected light-cone singularities. Moreover, we find that the full translationally-invariant celestial amplitude is simply the residue of the pole in the leaf amplitude at the point where the total conformal weights of the gluons equals three. This full celestial amplitude vanishes up to light-cone contact terms, as required by spacetime translation invariance, and reduces to the expression previously derived by Mellin transformation of the Parke-Taylor formula.

79 ASTRONOMY AND ASTROPHYSICS↗
DOE OSTI2026

Physical instabilities and the phase of the Euclidean path integral

We compute the phase of the Euclidean gravity partition function on manifolds of the form S p × M q . We find that the total phase is equal to the phase in pure gravity on S p times an extra phase that arises from negative mass squared fields that we obtain when we perform a Kaluza-Klein reduction to S p . The latter can be matched to the phase expected for physical negative modes seen by a static path observer in dS p . In the case of S p × S q the answer can be interpreted in terms of a computation in the static patch of dS p or dS q . We also provide the phase when we have a product of many spheres. We clarify the procedure for determining the precise phase factor. We discuss some aspects of the interpretation of this phase.

Models of Quantum Gravity↗
DOE OSTI2024

Islands far outside the horizon

Information located in an entanglement island in semiclassical gravity can be nonperturbatively reconstructed from distant radiation, implying a radical breakdown of effective field theory. We show that this occurs well outside of the black hole stretched horizon. We compute the island associated to large-angular momentum Hawking modes of a four-dimensional Schwarzschild black hole. These modes typically fall back into the black hole but can be extracted to infinity by relativistic strings or, more abstractly, by asymptotic boundary operators constructed using the timelike tube theorem. Remarkably, we find that their island can protrude a distance of order $\sqrt{\ell_p{r}_{\textrm{hor}}}$ outside the horizon. This is parametrically larger than the Planck scale ℓ p and is comparable to the Bohr radius for supermassive black holes. Therefore, in principle, a distant observer can determine experimentally whether the black hole information paradox is resolved by complementarity, or by a firewall.

AdS-CFT correspondence↗
DOE OSTI2025

On the Quantum Mechanics of Entropic Forces

It was conjectured 30 years ago that gravity could arise from the entropic rearrangement of information. We offer a set of microscopic quantum models which realize this idea in detail. In particular, we suggest a simple mechanism by which Newton’s law of gravity arises from extremization of the free energy of a collection of qubits or oscillators, rather than from the exchange of virtual quanta of a fundamental field. We give both a local and a nonlocal version of the construction and show how to distinguish a range of these entropic models from ordinary perturbative quantum gravity using existing observations and near-term experiments.

quantum fluctuations↗
DOE OSTI2024

NS5-brane backgrounds and coset CFT partition functions

Worldsheet string theory is solvable for a variety of backgrounds involving Neveu-Schwarz fivebranes, in terms of gauged nonlinear sigma models on group manifolds. We compute the worldsheet torus partition function of these models, and propose gauging of null isometries as a unifying principle and conceptual framework for this large family of string backgrounds. In the process, we explain how partition functions of asymmetrically gauged Wess-Zumino-Witten models can be computed from the path integral, and organize and systematize various results scattered throughout the literature.

72 PHYSICS OF ELEMENTARY PARTICLES AND FIELDS↗
DOE OSTI2024

A double copy from twisted (co)homology at genus one

We study the twisted (co)homology of a family of genus-one integrals — the so called Riemann-Wirtinger integrals. These integrals are closely related to one-loop string amplitudes in chiral splitting where one leaves the loop-momentum, modulus and all but one puncture un-integrated. While not actual one-loop string integrals, they share many properties and are simple enough that the associated twisted (co)homologies have been completely characterized [1]. Using intersection numbers — an inner product on the vector space of allowed differential forms — we derive the Gauss-Manin connection for two bases of the twisted cohomology providing an independent check of [2]. We also use the intersection index — an inner product on the vector space of allowed contours — to derive a double-copy formula for the closed-string analogues of Riemann-Wirtinger integrals (one-dimensional integrals over the torus). Similar to the celebrated KLT formula between open- and closed-string tree-level amplitudes, these intersection indices form a genus-one KLT-like kernel defining bilinears in meromorphic Riemann-Wirtinger integrals that are equal to their complex counterparts.

72 PHYSICS OF ELEMENTARY PARTICLES AND FIELDS↗
DOE OSTI2024

Open-closed string duality, branes, and topological recursion

We consider matrix models exhibiting open-closed string duality in two-dimensional string theories with various amounts of supersymmetry. In particular, a relationship between matrix models in the β = 2 Wigner-Dyson class and models in the (1 + 2Γ, 2) Altland-Zirnbauer class relates the perturbative solutions of the two systems’ string equations. Point-like operator insertions in the closed string theory are mapped to the topological expansion of the free energy in the open string theory. We compute correlation functions of macroscopic loop operators and FZZT branes in a general topological gravity background. The relationship between the topological recursion of moduli space volumes and branes is discussed by analyzing the Virasoro conditions in the matrix models.

2D Gravity↗