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The properties of warm dilute {alpha}-nucleon matter are studied in a variational approach in the Thomas-Fermi approximation starting from an effective two-body nucleon-nucleon interaction. The equation of state, symmetry energy, incompressibility of the said matter, and {alpha} fraction are in consonance with those evaluated from the virial approach, which sets the benchmark for such calculations at low densities.
This report summarizes the key achievements from my "Characterization of the initial state and medium properties of heavy-ion collisions at ALICE" award. This report summarizes the key achievements from DOE award, which started February 1st 2015, and ended January 31st 2018. The award funded experimental research into relativistic heavy-ion collisions at two facilities: The ALICE detector at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN, and the STAR detector at Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC) at Brookhaven National Laboratory. Relativistic heavy-ion collisions aim to create the Quark Gluon Plasma (QGP) is a unique state where the building blocks of nuclear matter, quarks and gluons, melt and move freely over the volume of the nucleus. It is believed that the universe temporarily existed in such a state shortly after the big bang, where the temperatures needed for this transition are roughly 100,000 times bigger than the temperature at the center of the Sun. Experimental data collected over the past decade at RHIC have provided evidence that the QGP has been created in the laboratory.
Here, the NASA telescope NICER has recently measured x-ray emissions from the heaviest of the precisely known two-solar mass neutron stars, PSR J0740 + 6620. Analysis of the data suggests that PSR J0740 + 6620 has a radius in the range of R 2.0 ≈ (11.4 – 16.1) km at the 68% credibility level. In this article, we study the implications of this analysis for the sound speed in the high-density inner cores by using recent chiral effective field theory (χEFT) calculations of the equation of state at next-to-next-to-next-to-leading order to describe outer regions of the star at modest density. We find that the lower bound on the maximum speed of sound in the inner core, min {c$^{2}_{s,max}$}, increases rapidly with the radius of massive neutron stars. If χ EFT remains an efficient expansion for nuclear interactions up to about twice the nuclear saturation density, R 2.0 ≥ 13 km requires min {c$^{2}_{s,max}$} ≥ 0.562 and 0.442 at the 68% and 95% credibility level, respectively.
We consider the sensitivity of fixed-target neutrino experiments at the luminosity frontier to light stable states, such as those present in models of MeV-scale dark matter. To ensure the correct thermal relic abundance, such states must annihilate via light mediators, which in turn provide an access portal for direct production in colliders or fixed targets. Indeed, this framework endows the neutrino beams produced at fixed-target facilities with a companion 'dark matter beam', which may be detected via an excess of elastic scattering events off electrons or nuclei in the (near-)detector. We study the high-luminosity proton fixed-target experiments at LSND and MiniBooNE, and determine that the ensuing sensitivity to light dark matter generally surpasses that of other direct probes. For scenarios with a kinetically-mixed U(1){sup '} vector mediator of mass m{sub V}, we find that a large volume of parameter space is excluded for m{sub DM}{approx}1-5 MeV, covering vector masses 2m{sub DM} < or approx. m{sub V} < or approx. m{sub {eta}} and a range of kinetic mixing parameters reaching as low as {kappa}{approx}10{sup -5}. The corresponding MeV-scale dark matter scenarios motivated by an explanation of the galactic 511 keV line are thus strongly constrained.
What do the typical entangled states of two black holes look like? Do they contain semiclassical interiors? We approach these questions constructively, providing ensembles of states that densely explore the black hole Hilbert space. The states contain very long Einstein-Rosen caterpillars : semiclassical wormholes with large numbers of matter inhomogeneities. Distinguishing these ensembles from the typical entangled states of the black holes is hard. We quantify this by deriving the correspondence between a microscopic notion of quantum randomness and the geometric length of the wormhole. This formalizes a “complexity = geometry” relation.
Here, we report benchmark calculations of the energy per particle of pure neutron matter as a function of the baryon density using three independent many-body methods: Brueckner–Bethe–Goldstone, Fermi hypernetted chain/single-operator chain, and auxiliary-field diffusion Monte Carlo. Significant technical improvements are implemented in the latter two methods. The calculations are made for two distinct families of realistic coordinate-space nucleon-nucleon potentials fit to scattering data, including the standard Argonne v 18 interaction and two of its simplified versions, and four of the new Norfolk Δ -full chiral effective field theory potentials. Primarily because of the advancements in the auxiliary-field diffusion Monte Carlo, we observe good agreement among the three many-body techniques up to nuclear saturation density—the maximum difference in the energy per particle is within 1.5 MeV for all the potentials we consider. At higher densities, the divergences become more important, and are mainly driven by the Fermi hypernetted chain/single-operator calculations. We also study the connection between nucleon-nucleon scattering data and the energy per particle of pure neutron matter. Our results suggest that fitting to higher-energy nucleon-nucleon scattering helps reduce the spread of energies among the models.
We review models of new physics in which dark matter arises as a composite bound state from a confining strongly-coupled non-Abelian gauge theory. We discuss several qualitatively distinct classes of composite candidates, including dark mesons, dark baryons, and dark glueballs. Here, we highlight some of the promising strategies for direct detection, especially through dark moments, using the symmetries and properties of the composite description to identify the operators that dominate the interactions of dark matter with matter, as well as dark matter self-interactions. We briefly discuss the implications of these theories at colliders, especially the (potentially novel) phenomenology of dark mesons in various regimes of the models. Throughout the review, we highlight the use of lattice calculations in the study of these strongly-coupled theories, to obtain precise quantitative predictions and new insights into the dynamics.
Inspired by natural cooling processes, dissipation has become a promising approach for preparing low-energy states of quantum systems. However, the potential of dissipative protocols remains unclear beyond certain commuting Hamiltonians. This work provides significant analytical and numerical insights into the power of dissipation for preparing the ground state of noncommuting Hamiltonians. For quasi-free dissipative dynamics, including certain 1D spin systems with boundary dissipation, our results reveal a new connection between the mixing time in trace distance and the spectral properties of a non-Hermitian Hamiltonian, leading to an explicit and sharp bound on the mixing time that scales polynomially with system size. For more general spin systems, we develop a tensor network-based algorithm for constructing the Lindblad jump operator and for simulating the dynamics. Using this algorithm, we demonstrate numerically that dissipative ground state preparation protocols can achieve rapid mixing for certain 1D local Hamiltonians under bulk dissipation, with a mixing time that scales logarithmically with the system size. We then prove the rapid mixing result for certain weakly interacting spin and fermionic systems in arbitrary dimensions, extending recent results for high-temperature quantum Gibbs samplers to the zero-temperature regime. Together, these results show that dissipation can be a powerful tool for ground state preparation, with potential applications across condensed matter physics, quantum materials science, and beyond.
We investigate the effect of supersonic relative velocities between baryons and dark matter, recently shown to arise generically at high redshift, on baryonic acoustic oscillation (BAO) measurements at low redshift. The amplitude of the relative velocity effect at low redshift is model-dependent, but can be parameterized by using an unknown bias. We find that if unaccounted, the relative velocity effect can shift the BAO peak position and bias estimates of the dark energy equation-of-state due to its non-smooth, out-of-phase oscillation structure around the BAO scale. Fortunately, the relative velocity effect can be easily modeled in constraining cosmological parameters without substantially inflating the error budget. We also demonstrate that the presence of the relative velocity effect gives rise to a unique signature in the galaxy bispectrum, which can be utilized to isolate this effect. Future dark energy surveys can accurately measure the relative velocity effect and subtract it from the power spectrum analysis to constrain dark energy models with high precision.
Synthetic soft matter systems, when driven beyond equilibrium by active processes, offer the potential to achieve dynamical states and functions of a complexity found in living matter. Emulsions offer the basis of a simple yet versatile system for identification of the physicochemical principles underlying active soft matter, but how multiple internal phases within emulsion droplets (e.g., Janus morphologies) organize to impact emergent dynamics is not understood. Here, we create multiphase oil droplets with ultralow interfacial tensions but distinct viscosities, and drive them into motion in aqueous micellar solutions. Preferential solubilization of select components of the oil both drives the droplet motion and yields a progression of internal phase morphological states with distinct symmetries. In this work, we find the active droplets to exhibit five dynamical states during morphogenesis. By quantifying microscopic flow fields, we show that it is possible to map the diverse droplet behaviors to squirmer models of spherical microswimmers in Stokes flow, thus showing that multiphase droplets offer the basis of a versatile platform with which to study and engineer the hydrodynamics of microswimmers.
We present a first-principles CFT calculation corresponding to the spherical collapse of a shell of matter in three dimensional quantum gravity. In field theory terms, we describe the equilibration process, from early times to thermalization, of a CFT following a sudden injection of energy at time t = 0. By formulating a continuum version of Zamolodchikov’s monodromy method to calculate conformal blocks at large central charge c, we give a framework to compute a general class of probe observables in the collapse state, incorporating the full backreaction of matter fields on the dual geometry. This is illustrated by calculating a scalar field two-point function at time-like separation and the time-dependent entanglement entropy of an interval, both showing thermalization at late times. Furthermore, the results are in perfect agreement with previous gravity calculations in the AdS 3 -Vaidya geometry. Information loss appears in the CFT as an explicit violation of unitarity in the 1/c expansion, restored by nonperturbative corrections.
We propose a new strategy to construct the equation of state (EOS) for neutron stars (NSs) with hadron-quark (H-Q) phase transition, by considering three density-regions. We supplement the EOS at H-Q region, very uncertain due to the confinement-deconfinement problems, by sandwitching in between and matching to the relatively 'well known' EOSs, i.e., the EOS at lower densities (H-phase up to several times nuclear density, calculated from a G-matrix approach) and that at ultra high densities (Q-phase, form a view of asymptotic freedom). Here, as a first step, we try a simple case and discuss the maximum mass of NSs.
We report on the recent developments of a new effective field theory for nuclear matter. We present first the nuclear matter chiral power counting that takes into account both short- and long-range inter-nucleon interactions. It also identifies non-perturbative strings of diagrams, related to the iteration of nucleon-nucleon interactions, which have to be re-summed. The methods of unitary chiral perturbation theory has been shown to be a useful tool in order to perform those resummations and provide sensible results up-to next-to-leading order for the ground state energy per particle of nuclear matter, in-medium chiral quark condensate and the self-energy and axial-vector couplings of the pion.
In these lectures, I describe a variety of efforts to identify or constrain the identity of dark matter by detecting the annihilation or decay products of these particles, or their effects. After reviewing the motivation for indirect searches, I discuss what we have learned about dark matter from observations of gamma rays, cosmic rays and neutrinos, as well as the cosmic microwave background. Measurements such as these have been used to significantly constrain a wide range of thermal relic dark matter candidates, in particular those with masses below a few hundred GeV. I also discuss a number of anomalies and excesses that have been interpreted as possible signals of dark matter, including the Galactic Center gamma-ray excess, the cosmic-ray antiproton excess, the cosmic-ray positron excess, and the 3.5 keV line. These lectures were originally presented as part of the 2018 Theoretical Advanced Study Institute (TASI) summer school on "Theory in an Era of Data". Although intended for advanced graduate students, these lectures may be useful for a wide range of physicists, astrophysicists and astronomers who wish to get an overview of the current state of indirect searches for dark matter.
Born in the aftermath of core-collapse supernovae, neutron stars contain matter under extraordinary conditions of density and temperature that are difficult to reproduce in the laboratory. In recent years, neutron star observations have begun to yield novel insights into the nature of strongly interacting matter in the high-density regime where current theoretical models are challenged. At the same time, chiral effective field theory has developed into a powerful framework to study nuclear matter properties with quantified uncertainties in the moderate-density regime for modeling neutron stars. In this article, we review recent developments in chiral effective field theory and focus on many-body perturbation theory as a computationally efficient tool for calculating the properties of hot and dense nuclear matter. We also demonstrate how effective field theory enables statistically meaningful comparisons among nuclear theory predictions, nuclear experiments, and observational constraints on the nuclear equation of state.
Uncertainties in our knowledge of the properties of dense matter near and above nuclear saturation density are among the main sources of variations in multimessenger signatures predicted for core-collapse supernovae (CCSNe) and the properties of neutron stars (NSs). We construct 97 new finite-temperature equations of state (EOSs) of dense matter that obey current experimental, observational, and theoretical constraints and discuss how systematic variations in the EOS parameters affect the properties of cold nonrotating NSs and the core collapse of a 20–M ⊙ progenitor star. The core collapse of the 20–M ⊙ progenitor star is simulated in spherical symmetry using the general-relativistic radiation-hydrodynamics code GR1D where neutrino interactions are computed for each EOS using the NuLib library. We conclude that the effective mass of nucleons at densities above nuclear saturation density is the largest source of uncertainty in the CCSN neutrino signal and dynamics even though it plays a subdominant role in most properties of cold NS matter. Meanwhile, changes in other observables affect the properties of cold NSs, while having little effect in CCSNe. To strengthen our conclusions, we perform six octant three-dimensional CCSN simulations varying the effective mass of nucleons at nuclear saturation density. Here, we conclude that neutrino heating and, thus, the likelihood of explosion is significantly increased for EOSs where the effective mass of nucleons at nuclear saturation density is large.
Warm-dense matter (WDM) is a highly-excited state that lies at the confluence of solids, plasmas, and liquids and that cannot be described by equilibrium theories. The transient nature of this state when created in a laboratory, as well as the difficulties in probing the strongly-coupled interactions between the electrons and the ions, make it challenging to develop a complete understanding of matter in this regime. Here in this work, by exciting isolated ~8 nm nanoparticles with a femtosecond laser below the ablation threshold, we create uniformly-excited WDM. We then use photoelectron spectroscopy to track the instantaneous electron temperature and directly extract the strongest electron-ion coupling observed experimentally to date. By directly comparing with state-of-the-art theories, we confirm that the superheated nanoparticles lie at the boundary between hot solids and plasmas, with associated strong electron-ion coupling. This is evidenced both by the fast energy loss of electrons to ions, as well as a strong modulation of the electron temperature by acoustic oscillations in the nanoparticle. This work demonstrates a new route for experimental exploration and theoretical validation of the exotic properties of WDM.
In this paper we report the composition dependent of dielectric properties in Se{sub 100-x}Cu{sub x} (x = 0, 2, 4 and 6) glassy alloys. The temperature and frequency dependence of the dielectric constants and the dielectric losses in the above glassy systems in the frequency range (1k Hz-5 M Hz) and temperature range (300 K–350 K) have been measured. It has been found that dielectric constant and the dielectric loss both are highly dependent on frequency and temperature and also found to increase with increasing concentration of Cu in pure amorphous Se. The role of Cu, as an impurity in the pure a-Se glassy alloy, is also discussed in terms of electronegativity difference between the elements used in making the aforesaid glassy system. Apart from this, the results have been also correlated in terms of a dipolar model which considers the hopping of charge carriers over a potential barrier between charged defect states.