Particle theory

Abstract:

New light hidden sector degrees of freedom represent one of the most approaches to going beyond the Standard Model. I give a short account of how such WISP candidates naturally appear in string compactifications and some descriptions of ways that they can affect early universe cosmology.

Abstract:

We report on a measurement of astrophysical tau neutrinos with 9.7 yr of IceCube data. Using convolutional neural networks trained on images derived from simulated events, seven candidate ντ events were found with visible energies ranging from roughly 20 TeV to 1 PeV and a median expected parent ντ energy of about 200 TeV. Considering backgrounds from astrophysical and atmospheric neutrinos, and muons from π±/K± decays in atmospheric air showers, we obtain a total estimated background of about 0.5 events, dominated by non-ντ astrophysical neutrinos. Thus, we rule out the absence of astrophysical ντ at the 5σ level. The measured astrophysical ντ flux is consistent with expectations based on previously published IceCube astrophysical neutrino flux measurements and neutrino oscillations.

Abstract:

The diffeomorphism class of simply connected smooth Calabi-Yau threefolds with torsion-free cohomology is determined via certain basic topological invariants: the Hodge numbers, the triple intersection form, and the second Chern class. In the present paper, we shed some light on this classification by placing bounds on the number of diffeomorphism classes present in the set of smooth Calabi-Yau threefolds constructed from the Kreuzer-Skarke (KS) list of reflexive polytopes up to Picard number six. The main difficulty arises from the comparison of triple intersection numbers and divisor integrals of the second Chern class up to basis transformations. By using certain basis-independent invariants, some of which appear here for the first time, we are able to place lower bounds on the number of classes. Upper bounds are obtained by explicitly identifying basis transformations, using constraints related to the index of line bundles. Extrapolating our results, we conjecture that the favorable entries of the KS list of reflexive polytopes lead to some (Formula presented.) diffeomorphically distinct Calabi-Yau threefolds.