Within the effective field theory approach to gravity, deviations from general relativity can be systematically described by higher-curvature operators. However, computing the resulting corrections to black hole quasinormal mode spectra remains challenging in the rapidly rotating regime, where perturbative expansions in the spin break down. We use recently constructed numerical rotating black hole solutions to compute quasinormal mode frequency corrections at leading order in the effective field theory. Focusing on scalar perturbations, we evaluate cubic-curvature corrections, which constitute the leading modifications. We employ a pseudospectral collocation method to solve the resulting perturbation equations on these backgrounds, enabling accurate computation across a broad parameter range. We obtain frequency corrections for fundamental modes with $l\le 5$ for all $m$, and the first overtone of $2\le l\le 5$ modes for all $m$ for spins up to $a=0.99M$, with relative errors below ${10}^{-4}$. We observe that corrections to certain modes grow significantly as the spin approaches the near-extremal regime.

We present basilic, a dedicated pipeline for Bayesian model selection and parameter estimation of short-duration gravitational-wave burst signals observable with ground-based detectors. Built on top of the bilby framework, basilic combines modularity, preimplemented burst models, and htcondor integration to enable rapid, user-friendly analyses with minimal technical overhead. This work outlines the design philosophy, operational flow, and a set of example use cases demonstrating its scientific potential. As a case study, we also undertake an in-depth exploration of the comparison between a binary black hole merger and a cosmic-string signal, through a parameter space exploration injection campaign. In addition to the well-known high-mass binary black-hole signal morphology degeneracy with cosmic-string-like signals, we find that high antialigned component spins, even at moderate mass, can result in a similar degeneracy. Motivated by the likely low-SNR regime expected of possible future detections, we propose a data-driven study of model degeneracy, to be employed in the event of an inconclusive Bayes factor.

We show that the late time Price’s power-law tail for perturbations of Schwarzschild, $t^{-2\ell -3}$ as $t\to \infty$, with $\ell$ the orbital quantum number, can be obtained from a sum of Schwarzschild–de Sitter quasinormal modes in the limit of vanishing cosmological constant, $\mathrm{\Lambda }\to 0^{+}$.

We introduce an analytic approach to study gravitational lensing in the presence of a distribution of hadrons. The situation is analogous to the propagation of photons in a medium with a nontrivial Cooper-pair condensate, where the photon acquires an effective mass term that may depend on the coordinates if the condensate is not homogeneous. As a result, photons generally do not follow null geodesics in the hadronic medium. In this setup, hadrons are described by the nonlinear sigma model minimally coupled to Maxwell theory. The modified Raychaudhuri equation, including hadronic corrections, is derived, along with the integral curves of probe photons in the eikonal approximation. These results are consistent with the theory of gravitational lensing in plasma media, with the advantage that transport properties, such as the refractive index, can be expressed analytically in terms of the hadronic density without assuming a phenomenological modeling thereof. As an example, we study the hadronic lensing produced by an analytic black hole sourced by superfluid pionic vortices, and we obtain the hadronic correction to the deflection angle in the weak-field limit.

Gravitational-wave detectors operate in inherently nonstationary environments, requiring robust detector characterization (DetChar) to distinguish instrumental transients from astrophysical signals. Traditional DetChar frameworks typically rely on morphological classifiers or energy-based projections, such as band-limited root-mean-square (BLRMS) metrics, which can conflate global amplitude scaling with physical reconfigurations of the spectrum. In this work, we introduce Fisher information velocity, a novel geometric channel that models the detector’s power spectral density as a point on a Riemannian manifold. By tracking the kinematic drift of the noise floor and utilizing exterior algebra to calculate tangent divergence ($\sin \theta$), we mathematically decouple simple energy surges from spectral warps, or differential redistributions of power across frequency bands. Applying this framework via the sgn-drift streaming pipeline to $\sim 40$ hours of high-cadence Advanced LIGO O4a data, we evaluate $N=282$, 080 independent manifold velocity samples. High-resolution phase space mapping reveals a bimodal taxonomy of severe instrumental nonstationarity, classifying events into structural pivots (87.2%) and isotropic surges (12.8%). Among codetected events, the geometric channel achieves higher significance than standard BLRMS monitors in 74% of cases with a median sensitivity ratio of $\mathrm{\Gamma }=1.65$. The two channels detect largely nonoverlapping populations, increasing the total anomaly catalog by 87% over BLRMS alone. Systematic validation on 10 confirmed GWTC-4.0 events and $\sim 5$, 000 simulated injections demonstrates robust insensitivity to astrophysical signals, establishing this geometric channel as a sensitive, complementary, and veto-safe diagnostic for current and next-generation detector networks.

The South Pole Telescope (SPT), using its third-generation camera, SPT-3G, is conducting observations of the cosmic microwave background (CMB) in temperature and polarization across approximately $10000{\mathrm{deg}}^2$ of the sky at 95, 150, and 220 GHz. This comprehensive dataset should yield stringent constraints on cosmological parameters. In this work, we explore its potential to address the Hubble tension by forecasting constraints from temperature, polarization, and CMB lensing on early dark energy (EDE) and the variation in electron mass in spatially flat and curved universes. For this purpose, we investigate first whether analyzing the distinct SPT-3G observation fields independently, as opposed to as a single, unified region, results in a loss of information relevant to cosmological parameter estimation. We develop a realistic temperature and polarization likelihood pipeline capable of analyzing these fields in these two ways, and subsequently forecast constraints on cosmological parameters. Our findings indicate that any loss of constraining power from analyzing the fields separately is primarily concentrated at low multipoles ($\ell <50$) and the overall impact on the relative uncertainty on standard $\mathrm{\Lambda }$ cold dark matter parameters is minimal ($<3\%$). Our forecasts suggest that SPT-3G data should improve by more than a factor of 90 and 190 the figure of merit of the EDE and the varying electron mass models, respectively, when combined with Planck data. The likelihood pipeline developed and used in this work is made publicly available online.

The cosmic microwave background power spectra are a primary window into the early universe. However, achieving interpretable compression and fast inference diagnostics under weak model assumptions remains challenging. We propose a parameter-conditioned variational autoencoder (CVAE) that aligns a data-driven latent representation with cosmological parameters while retaining an interface to likelihood-style diagnostic tests. The model achieves high directional reconstruction fidelity for the $D_{\ell }^{TT}$, $D_{\ell }^{EE}$, and $D_{\ell }^{TE}$ spectra in just five latent dimensions. It reconstructs spectra for several test cases beyond the $\mathrm{\Lambda }$ cold dark matter ($\mathrm{\Lambda }\mathrm{CDM}$) model, including controlled parameter extrapolations, and enables an amortized surrogate diagnostic that reduces one representative post-training Markov chain Monte Carlo run from $\sim 40$ hours on CPU cores to $\sim 2\mathrm{minutes}$ on a graphics processing unit in this demonstration. The learned latent space shows a distributed, partially structured organization that mirrors known cosmological parameters and their degeneracies. It also provides representation-space discrimination diagnostics for distinguishing tested cosmological spectra from a fiducial reference. Overall, this physics-informed CVAE supports interpretable compression, rapid diagnostic exploration, and anomaly-sensitive representation learning beyond $\mathrm{\Lambda }\mathrm{CDM}$.

The relic abundance of vector dark matter originating from an inherited axion-SU(2) condensate is typically determined by implementing an adiabatic matching procedure across the symmetry-breaking transition. We demonstrate that this outcome does not arise in the generic case. The postinflationary crossover can be formulated as a dynamical quantum quench problem, in which the residual coherent component of the field is characterized by a survival factor that induces an order-unity renormalization of the standard abundance relation. Expressed in conformal time, the spatially homogeneous condensate dynamics reduce to those of a canonical oscillator with quartic and quadratic self-interactions. This representation enables an analytic determination of the matching conditions across the symmetry-breaking transition, the derivation of the corresponding quench work and excess energy relations, and a quantitative validation of the coherent sector description via numerical simulations in both Minkowski and Friedmann-Robertson-Walker backgrounds. We also formulate the homogeneous fluctuation theory via the diagonal-$SO(3)$ $1\oplus 3\oplus 5$ decomposition and isolate a soft traceless-symmetric quintet with a $k=0$ vacuum obstruction, a regulated ultraviolet adiabatic bound, and a positive quartic stabilization term. Collectively, these results refine the theoretical description of inherited non-Abelian dark matter production and establish the necessary infrared framework for subsequent investigations of finite-$k$ gauge-Higgs transfer dynamics.

Galaxy clustering constrains the baryon fraction ${\mathrm{\Omega }}_{\mathrm{b}}/{\mathrm{\Omega }}_{\mathrm{m}}$ through the amplitude of baryon acoustic oscillations and the suppression of perturbations entering the horizon before recombination. This produces a different prerecombination distribution of baryons and dark matter. After recombination, the gravitational potential responds to both components in proportion to their mass, allowing robust measurement of the baryon fraction. This is independent of new-physics scenarios altering the recombination background (e.g. early dark energy). The accuracy of such measurements does, however, depend on how baryons and cold dark matter (CDM) are modeled in the power spectrum. Previous template-based splitting relied on approximate transfer functions that neglected part of information. We present a new method that embeds an extra parameter controlling the balance between baryons and dark matter in the growth terms of the perturbation equations in the camb Boltzmann solver. This approach captures the baryonic suppression of CDM prior to recombination, avoids inconsistencies, and yields a clean parametrization of the baryon fraction in the linear power spectrum, separating out the simple physics of growth due to the combined matter potential. We implement this framework in an analysis pipeline using effective field theory of large-scale structure with halo occupation distribution-informed priors and validate it against noiseless $\mathrm{\Lambda }\mathrm{CDM}$ and early dark energy cosmologies with Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument (DESI)-like errors. The new scheme achieves comparable precision to previous splitting while reducing systematic biases, providing a more robust way to baryon-fraction measurements. In combination with big bang nucleosynthesis constraints on the baryon density and Alcock-Paczyński estimates of the matter density, these results strengthen the use of baryon fraction measurements to derive a Hubble constant from energy densities, with future DESI and Euclid data expected to deliver competitive constraints.

Oscillation frequencies excited in neutron stars are crucial for extracting their interior properties. In addition to the fundamental and pressure modes, the gravity ($g$-)modes can be excited even in zero-temperature stellar models due to the composition gradient. In this study, we systematically study the $g$-mode frequencies, focusing on the nucleonic equation of state. Then, we derive an empirical relation for the first $g$-mode frequencies as a function of the stellar compactness and the combination of the nuclear saturation parameters, ${\eta }_0\equiv L/K_0$, where $K_0$ and $L$ denote the incompressibility of symmetric nuclear matter and the density dependence of the nuclear symmetry energy, respectively. If an observed first $g$-mode frequency significantly deviates from our empirical relation, it may indicate the emergence of additional degrees of freedom or new compositions inside the star.

The energy-dependent apparent extension of the Crab Nebula, inconsistent with leptonic expectations between x-ray and TeV bands, can be naturally accounted for in a spatially resolved lepto-hadronic scenario. A transition to hadronic dominance occurs above $\sim 400\mathrm{TeV}$, with nearly pure hadronic emission at PeV energies. The predicted 68% containment radius at 1.1 PeV is $\sim {1.4}^{\prime }$, about six times larger than in purely leptonic scenarios. This energy-dependent extension therefore provides an observable discriminator of the origin of ultrahigh-energy gamma-ray emission in pulsar wind nebulae, offering a diagnostic of PeV hadronic acceleration in the Crab Nebula.

Detecting the stochastic gravitational wave background (SGWB) from our Universe under the inflationary era is one of the primary scientific objectives of DECi-hertz Interferometer Gravitational wave Observatory (DECIGO), a space-borne gravitational wave detector sensitive in the $\sim 0.1\mathrm{Hz}$ frequency band. This frequency band is dominated by the gravitational waves from inspiraling compact object binaries. Subtracting these signals is necessary to search for the primordial SGWB. In this paper, we assess the feasibility of the subtraction of such binary signals by employing the population model inferred from the latest gravitational wave event catalogue of the LIGO-Virgo-KAGRA Collaboration. We find that the projection scheme, which was originally proposed by Cutler and Harms (2005), is necessary to reduce the binary signals to the level where DECIGO can detect the primordial background.

Neutrino flavor evolution in dense astrophysical environments such as core-collapse supernova (CCSN) is influenced by collective effects. While the Fast Flavor Instability (FFI) and the Collisional Flavor Instability (CFI) are recognized as key drivers of rapid flavor conversion, their nonlinear competition with collisional damping in spatially inhomogeneous systems remains poorly understood. Motivated by recent findings that FFI and resonancelike CFI cooccur in the postbounce phase in CCSN, we scrutinize their dynamic competitions and asymptotic states. To this end, we perform numerical simulations of the quantum kinetic neutrino transport, incorporating both spatial advection and the collision terms. We demonstrate that the interplay between these coexisting neutrino flavor instabilities and collisions leads to rich dynamics. Rather than merely inducing simple decoherence, collisional damping can substantially alter the overall dynamics of collective flavor oscillations, driving the system through complex evolutionary pathways. In all cases where flavor instability develops, we find that the system converges to the same flavor-equilibrated asymptotic state, despite the diversity of intermediate dynamics. Our results suggest that realistic collisional effects drive the system to an asymptotic state distinct from the one predicted by the collisionless FFI picture. This highlights the importance of incorporating collisional effects when modeling the asymptotic outcome of flavor conversion in CCSN models.

The speedup of parameter estimation is an active field of research in gravitational-wave data analysis. In this paper, we present GP15, a deep-learning method that merges residual networks and normalizing flows into a general-purpose, image-based estimator of binary black hole (BBH) parameters. Building on our early work, we map BBH spectrograms from the Advanced LIGO and Advanced Virgo detectors to color channels in an RGB image amenable to be processed with residual networks. GP15 is trained on simulated data for BBH mergers obtained with the IMRPhenomXPHM waveform approximant and tested for all three-detector events from the gravitational-wave transient catalogs GWTC-3 and GWTC-2.1 reported by the LIGO-Virgo-KAGRA (LVK) Collaboration. Overall, our model yields good agreement with the LVK results over most parameters. Our simple model can produce large amounts of posterior samples on the order of a second, complementing existing approaches with normalizing flows based on time or frequency representation of gravitational-wave data. We also discuss current shortcomings of our model and possible improvements for future extensions (e.g., including noise conditioning from the detectors’ power spectral density or splitting the parameter space into intrinsic and extrinsic subspaces).

This is the second in a pair of papers forecasting the sensitivity of the Square Kilometre Array (SKA) to dark photons, a highly motivated, simple extension of the Standard Model. Through a kinetic mixing term, visible photons from the cosmic microwave background can resonantly convert into dark photons, generating new temperature anisotropies in the sky. In this work, we detail the entire analysis pipeline that we use to compute SKA’s sensitivity, focusing on resonant conversions that occur in the intergalactic medium. We also discuss the sensitivity of 21-cm experiments to dark photons. Our results show that both SKA in combination with galaxy surveys and 21-cm experiments could discover dark photons with masses between $5\times {10}^{-15}$ and $5\times {10}^{-12}\mathrm{eV}$, and kinetic mixing parameter $\epsilon$ as low as ${10}^{-8}$.

Mixing between dark photons and visible photons leads to substantial anisotropies in the cosmic microwave background due to resonant conversions of visible photons into dark photons in baryonic matter found in dark matter halos. In this work, we forecast the sensitivity of the Square Kilometre Array (SKA) to this signal. We find that SKA could be the first experiment to discover dark photons with a mass between ${10}^{-13}$ and $5\times {10}^{-12}\mathrm{eV}$ and kinetic mixing parameter $\epsilon$ as small as $\sim {10}^{-8}$ by cross-correlating their data with a low-redshift galaxy survey, potentially improving on the sensitivity from a similar analysis using Planck data by a factor of 4 in $\epsilon$. This improvement is largely due to an enhancement of the signal at low frequencies and the unique experimental advantages of radio telescopes such as small beam sizes.

To date, frequency-dependent squeezed light has been used to reduce quantum noise in interferometric gravitational wave detectors by 6.1 dB (a factor of two). Future upgrades and detectors aim to both reduce quantum noise by 10 dB (a factor of three) and to increase the circulating power in the interferometer arm cavities. Achieving these goals will be extremely challenging due, in part, to the degradations to the squeezed state caused by mode mismatch between the internal interferometer optical cavities and between the auxiliary external cavities. It is therefore imperative to gain a detailed understanding of all sources of mismatch and to obtain experience in mitigating their effects in the current detectors in order to improve astrophysical sensitivity now and in the future. Two types of internal mismatch are identified which are due to the thermal aberrations generated when the test mass optics absorb a small fraction of the circulating arm power. It is found that the dynamics responsible for the degradations caused by the mismatch between the quadratic part of the wavefront of two modes has a characteristic low-pass frequency dependence while the dynamics of the mismatch due to all higher-order thermal aberrations has a high-pass behavior. As a consequence, the two types of mismatch are predominantly responsible for different squeezing degradations; some of which are significant for the current detectors and some of which will only be important for future detectors with longer arms. The behavior of these two types of internal mismatch are described, and the implications for detector design, operation, and characterization are discussed.

We derive explicit anomaly-index formulas for four-dimensional Weyl fermions charged under the finite symmetries $\text{Spin}\times {\mathbb{Z}}_n$ and $\text{Spin}{\times }_{{\mathbb{Z}}_2^{\mathrm{F}}}{\mathbb{Z}}_{2m}^{\mathrm{F}}$. The strategy is to start from the standard perturbative anomaly indices for $\text{Spin}\times \mathrm{U}(1)$ and $\text{Spin}{\times }_{{\mathbb{Z}}_2^{\mathrm{F}}}\mathrm{U}(1)={\text{Spin}}^c$, and then restrict the continuous U(1) symmetry to a finite cyclic subgroup. On the level of invertible field theories this gives natural homomorphisms, ${\mathrm{TP}}_5(\text{Spin}\times \mathrm{U}(1))⟶{\mathrm{TP}}_5(\text{Spin}\times {\mathbb{Z}}_n),{\mathrm{TP}}_5({\text{Spin}}^c)⟶{\mathrm{TP}}_5(\text{Spin}{\times }_{{\mathbb{Z}}_2^{\mathrm{F}}}{\mathbb{Z}}_{2m}^{\mathrm{F}})$. We compute these maps explicitly by evaluating reduced $\eta$ invariants on geometric representatives of the finite anomaly groups. For $\text{Spin}\times {\mathbb{Z}}_n$, the relevant backgrounds are the five-dimensional lens-space bundle $X(n;1,1)$ and the product $L(n;1)\times \mathrm{K}3$. For $\text{Spin}{\times }_{{\mathbb{Z}}_2^{\mathrm{F}}}{\mathbb{Z}}_{2m}^{\mathrm{F}}$, the relevant backgrounds are $L(m;1,1,1)$ and, depending on the parity of $m$, either $L(m;1)\times \text{Enriques}$ or $L(m;1)\times \mathrm{K}3$. The output is a pair of integer-valued anomaly indices for each finite symmetry. These indices are normalized in the cyclic factors of the finite anomaly group, so they can be used directly in anomaly-cancellation checks for fermions with discrete gauge or global symmetries. They also provide the input for symmetry-extension applications to topologically ordered quantum dark matter: in Standard Model examples, the indices identify the discrete $\mathbf{B}+\mathbf{L}$ mixed gauge-gravitational anomaly left by missing sterile right-handed neutrinos and the finite $K$-gauge topological sector that can match it.

Displaced vertex (DV) signatures at colliders offer a powerful probe of new long-lived particles beyond the Standard Model. Among the best-motivated candidates are heavy neutral leptons (HNLs)—heavier counterparts of Standard Model neutrinos—which can account for the origin of neutrino masses and potentially produce di-leptonic DV signatures. In this study, we demonstrate how existing DV searches at the LHC can be extended to probe HNLs that couple predominantly to the tau-neutrino flavor. While current search strategies rely on identifying a prompt lepton alongside a displaced vertex, we show that analyzing events without a prompt lepton enables sensitivity to the process $pp\to W\to \tau N$, where the tau decays hadronically and the HNL subsequently decays to a lepton pair and a neutrino. We perform detailed Monte Carlo simulations of this process with HNLs decaying to ${\mu }^{+}{\mu }^{-}$ or $e^{+}{e}^{-}$ final states, apply ATLAS-inspired selection criteria, and optimize signal sensitivity. In particular, we demonstrate that appropriate cuts in the plane of dilepton invariant mass and DV radial position significantly enhance signal visibility. We propose several such optimized strategies and show that, even with Run 2 data ($139{\mathrm{fb}}^{-1}$), existing bounds can be improved by more than an order of magnitude. Future high-luminosity runs may strengthen sensitivity by up to 3 orders of magnitude compared to current limits.

We propose a method to accurately calculate the momentum distributions of the produced boson and fermion pairs and the phase distributions of pair-production probability amplitudes in a spatially homogeneous and time-dependent electric field. Applying this method to multiphoton pair production in a circularly polarized electric field rotating around the $z$-axis, we clarify that the topological charge appearing in the phase distributions of pair-production probability amplitudes reflects the orbital angular momentum (OAM) of the produced pairs rather than that of individual particles. On this basis, we demonstrate that, within the framework of the external-field approximation, the $z$-component of the total angular momentum of the field and the particles is conserved, whereas the conservation of total angular momentum cannot be verified. The results also reveal that pair production is constrained by $C$-parity conservation, and that pairs with smaller OAM are produced more favorably. These findings provide deeper insight into angular momentum transfer in pair production.