AION/Magis

Abstract:

The existence of right-handed neutrinos with Majorana masses below the electroweak scale could help address the origins of neutrino masses, the matter–antimatter asymmetry, and dark matter. In this paper, leptonic decays of W bosons from 140 fb-1$$^{-1}$$ of 13 TeV proton–proton collisions at the LHC, reconstructed in the ATLAS experiment, are used to search for heavy neutral leptons produced through their mixing with muon or electron neutrinos in a scenario with lepton number violation. The search is conducted using prompt leptonic decay signatures. The considered final states require two same-charge leptons or three leptons, while vetoing three-lepton same-flavour topologies. No significant excess over the expected Standard Model backgrounds is found, leading to constraints on the heavy neutral lepton’s mixing with muon and electron neutrinos for heavy-neutral-lepton masses. The analysis excludes |Ue|2$$|U_{e}|^2$$ values above 8×10-5$$8\times 10^{-5}$$ and |Uμ|2$$|U_{\mu }|^2$$ values above 5.0×10-5$$5.0 \times 10^{-5}$$ in the full mass range of 8–65 GeV. The strongest constraints are placed on heavy-neutral-lepton masses in the range 15–30 GeV of |Ue|2<1.1×10-5$$|U_{e}|^2 < 1.1 \times 10^{-5}$$ and |Uμ|2<5×10-6$$|U_{\mu }|^2 < 5 \times 10^{-6}$$.

Abstract:

At the Large Hadron Collider, the WbWb final state is expected to be dominated by tt¯$$ t\overline{t} $$ production with a contribution from single-top processes. Differential cross-sections for WbWb production in the dilepton decay channel are measured at the particle level as a function of various kinematic variables. The analysis is based on data from proton-proton collisions at a centre-of-mass energy of s=13$$ \sqrt{s}=13 $$ TeV, recorded by the ATLAS detector at the Large Hadron Collider over the period from 2015 to 2018, corresponding to an integrated luminosity of 140 fb−1. Measurements are performed within the fiducial phase-space defined by the presence of two b-jets and one electron and one muon of opposite charges. The differential cross-sections are corrected for detector effects and unfolded to the particle level. Results are compared with predictions from Monte Carlo event generators at next-to-leading order in perturbative quantum chromodynamics; overall the measurements are in reasonable agreement with several generator setups, although no single prediction is able to describe all measured distributions simultaneously. These measurements provide valuable constraints on the modelling of WbWb production and the interference between doubly resonant and singly resonant WbWb production.

Abstract:

MALTA2 is a depleted monolithic active pixel sensor (DMAPS) designed for tracking at high rates and typically low detection threshold of 200e⁻. Threshold calibration is crucial to understanding the charge collection in the pixel. A simple procedure is developed to calibrate the threshold to unit electrons making use of a dedicated charge injection circuit and an Fe-55 source with dominant charge deposition of 1611e⁻. The injection voltage corresponding to the signal under exposure of Fe-55 is determined and serves as the basis for charge calibration. The charge injection circuit incorporates a capacitance with design value of Cinj=230aF. Experimentally, the average capacitance value for non-irradiated samples is found to be Cinj,exp=255±35aF and varies between sensors by 14% in terms of standard deviation. The deviation from the design value as well as among sensors motivates the need for the presented calibration procedure, which is proposed to be performed for each MALTA2 sensor and reduces the uncertainty down to 3% depending on the sensor.

Abstract:

This Letter reports the observation of W + W − γ triboson production in 140 fb − 1 of data collected by the ATLAS detector from proton–proton collisions at a centre-of-mass energy of s = 13 TeV at the LHC. Events with an opposite-charge e μ pair, a high transverse-momentum photon, and significant missing transverse momentum are considered. The observed (expected) significance of the signal is 5.9 (6.0) standard deviations. The measured fiducial cross-section, defined for the W + W − γ → e ± μ ∓ ν ν ¯ γ final state is 6.2 ± 0.8 (stat.) ± 0.6 (sys.) fb, in good agreement with the Standard Model prediction of 6.1 − 0.7 + 1.0 fb. Constraints on the Wilson coefficients of 13 dimension-8 operators describing physics beyond the Standard Model through anomalous quartic gauge-boson couplings are derived using the effective.

Abstract:

The thermal confinement phase transition in $\mathrm{SU}(N)$ Yang-Mills theory is first order for $N\ge 3$ , with bounce action scaling as $N^2$ . Remarkably, lattice data for the action include a small coefficient whose presence likely strongly alters the phase transition dynamics. We give evidence, utilizing insights from softly broken supersymmetric Yang-Mills models, that the small coefficient originates from a deconfined phase instability just below the critical temperature. We predict the maximum achievable supercooling in $\mathrm{SU}(N)$ theories to be a few percent, which can be tested on the lattice. We briefly discuss the potentially significant suppression of the associated cosmological gravitational wave signals.