Effective field theories (EFT) of dark energy (DE) — built to parameterise the properties of DE in an agnostic manner — are severely constrained by measurements of the propagation speed of gravitational waves (GW). However, GW frequencies probed by ground-based interferometers lie around the typical strong coupling scale of the EFT, and it is likel...
We revisit the problem of the "probability of inflation" from the point of view of the Einstein-Cartan theory, where torsion can be present off-shell even in the absence of spinorial currents. An informal estimate suggests that the barrier for tunneling from "nothing" into a classical universe becomes thinner and lower, should torsion be present, e...
We construct a new class of supersymmetric AdS3 × Y7 solutions of type IIB supergravity, where Y7 is an S5 fibration over a spindle, which are dual to d = 2, N = (0, 2) SCFTs. The solutions are constructed in a sub-truncation of D = 5, SO(6) maximal gauged supergravity and they all lie within the anti-twist class. We show that the central charge co...
Liquid argon time projection chamber detector technology provides high spatial and calorimetric resolutions on the charged particles traversing liquid argon. As a result, the technology has been used in a number of recent neutrino experiments, and is the technology of choice for the Deep Underground Neutrino Experiment (DUNE). In order to perform h...
Evidence is reported for electroweak (EW) vector boson scattering in the decay channel νqq of two weak vector bosons WV (V = W or Z), produced in association with two parton jets. The search uses a data set of proton-proton collisions at 13 TeV collected with the CMS detector during 2016–2018 with an integrated luminosity of 138 fb−1. Events are se...
Production cross sections of Υ(1S), Υ(2S), and Υ(3S) states decaying into μ+μ− in proton-lead (pPb) collisions are reported using data collected by the CMS experiment at √sNN = 5.02 TeV. A comparison is made with corresponding cross sections obtained with pp data measured at the same collision energy and scaled by the Pb nucleus mass number. The nu...
We construct a family of type IIB string backgrounds that are deformations of AdS3 × S3 × T4 with a “squashed” AdS3 × S3 metric supported by a combination of NSNS and RR fluxes. They have global SU(1, 1) × SU(2) symmetry, regular curvature, constant dilaton and preserve 8 supercharges. Upon compactification to 4 dimensions they reduce to N = 2 supe...