MIT Center for Theoretical Physics — a Leinweber Institute Publications

We introduce a diffusion-based generative model to describe the distribution of galaxies in our Universe directly as a collection of points in 3-D space (coordinates) optionally with associated attributes (e.g., velocities and masses), without resorting to binning or voxelization. The custom diffusion model can be used both for emulation, reproducing essential summary statistics of the galaxy distribution, as well as inference, by computing the conditional likelihood of a galaxy field. We demonstrate a first application to massive dark matter haloes in the Quijote simulation suite. This approach can be extended to enable a comprehensive analysis of cosmological data, circumventing limitations inherent to summary statistic -- as well as neural simulation-based inference methods.

We investigate Wilsonian effective field theory as a model for the construction of the tachyon potential and nonperturbative vacua in closed string field theory. In a number of cases we are able to find the effective potential exactly, and observe what appear to be universal features. We find that the effective field theory contains the same nonperturbative vacuum structure as the bare Lagrangian, though this information is encoded less efficiently as the distance scale of the effective field theory is increased. The implication is that closed string field theory plausibly contains information about the nonperturbative vacuum structure of string theory, in spite of its similarities to effective field theory. We also truncate the effective potential at a fixed power of the field and investigate how the global structure of the effective potential may be approximated via Padé resummation. Qualitative comparisons suggest that computation of the eighth to sixteenth order closed string vertex should be enough to obtain reliable results for the closed string field theory action evaluated on the tachyon field.

We investigate the transverse energy-energy correlators (TEEC) in the small-\(x\) regime at the upcoming Electron-Ion Collider (EIC). Focusing on the back-to-back production of electron-hadron pairs in both \(ep\) and \(eA\) collisions, we establish a factorization theorem given in terms of the hard function, quark distributions, soft functions, and TEEC jet functions, where the gluon saturation effect is incorporated. Numerical results for TEEC in both \(ep\) and \(eA\) collisions are presented, together with the nuclear modification factor \(R_A\). Our analysis reveals that TEEC observables in deep inelastic scattering provide a valuable approach for probing gluon saturation phenomena. Our findings underscore the significance of measuring TEEC at the EIC, emphasizing its efficacy in advancing our understanding of gluon saturation and nuclear modifications in high-energy collisions.

Accelerator-based experiments reliant on charged pion and kaon decays to produce muon-neutrino beams also deliver an associated powerful flux of muons. Therefore, these experiments can additionally be sensitive to light new particles that preferentially couple to muons and decay to visible final states on macroscopic length scales. Such particles are produced through rare 3-body meson decays in the decay pipe or via muon scattering in the beam dump, and decay in a downstream detector. To demonstrate the potential of this search strategy, we recast existing MiniBooNE and MicroBooNE studies of neutral pion production in neutrino-induced neutral-current scattering (\(\nu_\mu N \to \nu_\mu N \pi^0,~\pi^0\rightarrow \gamma\gamma\)) to place new leading limits on light (\(< 2m_\mu\)) muon-philic scalar particles that decay to diphotons through loops of virtual muons. Our results exclude scalars of mass between 10 and 60 MeV in which this scenario resolves the muon \(g-2\) anomaly. We also make projections for the sensitivity of SBND to these models and provide a road map for future neutrino experiments to perform dedicated searches for muon-philic forces.

Spacetime inversion symmetries such as parity and time reversal play a central role in physics, but they are usually treated as global symmetries. In quantum gravity there are no global symmetries, so any spacetime inversion symmetries must be gauge symmetries. In particular this includes \(\mathcal{CRT}\) symmetry (in even dimensions usually combined with a rotation to become \(\mathcal{CPT}\)), which in quantum field theory is always a symmetry and seems likely to be a symmetry of quantum gravity as well. In this article we discuss what it means to gauge a spacetime inversion symmetry, and we explain some of the more unusual consequences of doing this. In particular we argue that the gauging of \(\mathcal{CRT}\) is automatically implemented by the sum over topologies in the Euclidean gravity path integral, that in a closed universe the Hilbert space of quantum gravity must be a real vector space, and that in Lorentzian signature manifolds which are not time-orientable must be included as valid configurations of the theory. In particular we give an example of an asymptotically-AdS time-unorientable geometry which must be included to reproduce computable results in the dual CFT.

In gravity, spacelike separated regions can be dependent on each other due to the constraint equations. In this paper, we give a natural definition of subsystem independence and gravitational dressing of perturbations in classical gravity. We find that extremal surfaces, non-perturbative lumps of matter, and generic trapped surfaces are structures that enable dressing and subregion independence. This leads to a simple intuitive picture for why extremal surfaces tend to separate independent subsystems. The underlying reason is that localized perturbations on one side of an extremal surface contribute negatively to the mass on the other side, making the gravitational constraints behave as if there exist both negative and positive charges. Our results support the consistency of islands in massless gravity, shed light on the Python's lunch, and provide hints on the nature of the split property in perturbatively quantized general relativity. We also prove a theorem bounding the area of certain surfaces in spherically symmetric asymptotically de Sitter spacetimes from above and below in terms of the horizon areas of de Sitter and Nariai. This theorem implies that it is impossible to deform a single static patch without also deforming the opposite patch, provided we assume spherical symmetry and an energy condition.

Infrared and collinear (IRC) safety has long been used a proxy for robustness when developing new jet substructure observables. This guiding philosophy has been carried into the deep learning era, where IRC-safe neural networks have been used for many jet studies. For graph-based neural networks, the most straightforward way to achieve IRC safety is to weight particle inputs by their energies. However, energy-weighting by itself does not guarantee that perturbative calculations of machine-learned observables will enjoy small non-perturbative corrections. In this paper, we demonstrate the sensitivity of IRC-safe networks to non-perturbative effects, by training an energy flow network (EFN) to maximize its sensitivity to hadronization. We then show how to construct Lipschitz Energy Flow Networks (L-EFNs), which are both IRC safe and relatively insensitive to non-perturbative corrections. We demonstrate the performance of L-EFNs on generated samples of quark and gluon jets, and showcase fascinating differences between the learned latent representations of EFNs and L-EFNs.

We demonstrate how recent developments in string field theory provide a framework to systematically study type II flux compactifications with non-trivial Ramond-Ramond profiles. We present an explicit example where physical observables can be computed order by order in a small parameter which can be effectively viewed as string coupling constant. We obtain the corresponding background solution of the string field equations of motions up to the second order in the expansion. Along the way, we show how the tadpole cancellations of the string field equations lead to the minimization of the F-term potential of the low energy supergravity description. String field action expanded around the obtained background solution furnishes a worldsheet description of the flux compactifications.

We classify one-dimensional symmetry-protected topological (SPT) phases protected by dipole symmetries. A dipole symmetry comprises two sets of symmetry generators: charge and dipole operators, which together form a non-trivial algebra with translations. Using matrix product states (MPS), we show that for a \(G\) dipole symmetry with \(G\) a finite abelian group, the one-dimensional dipolar SPTs are classified by the group \(H^2[G\times G,U(1)]/H^2[G,U(1)]^2\). Because of the symmetry algebra, the MPS tensors exhibit an unusual property, prohibiting the fractionalization of charge operators at the edges. For each phase in the classification, we explicitly construct a stabilizer Hamiltonian to realize the SPT phase and derive the response field theories by coupling the dipole symmetry to background tensor gauge fields. These field theories generalize the Dijkgraaf-Witten theories to twisted finite tensor gauge theories.

We propose an algebraic definition of ER=EPR in the \(G_N \to 0\) limit, which associates bulk spacetime connectivity/disconnectivity to the operator algebraic structure of a quantum gravity system. The new formulation not only includes information on the amount of entanglement, but also more importantly the structure of entanglement. We give an independent definition of a quantum wormhole as part of the proposal. This algebraic version of ER=EPR sheds light on a recent puzzle regarding spacetime disconnectivity in holographic systems with \({\cal O}(1/G_{N})\) entanglement. We discuss the emergence of quantum connectivity in the context of black hole evaporation and further argue that at the Page time, the black hole-radiation system undergoes a transition involving the transfer of an emergent type III\(_{1}\) subalgebra of high complexity operators from the black hole to radiation. We argue this is a general phenomenon that occurs whenever there is an exchange of dominance between two competing quantum extremal surfaces.

We introduce a pairing-based graph neural network, \(\textit{GemiNet}\), for simulating quantum many-body systems. Our architecture augments a BCS mean-field wavefunction with a generalized pair amplitude parameterized by a graph neural network. Variational Monte Carlo with GemiNet simultaneously provides an accurate, flexible, and scalable method for simulating many-electron systems. We apply GemiNet to two-dimensional semiconductor electron-hole bilayers and obtain highly accurate results on a variety of interaction-induced phases, including the exciton Bose-Einstein condensate, electron-hole superconductor, and bilayer Wigner crystal. Our study demonstrates the potential of physically-motivated neural network wavefunctions for quantum materials simulations.

The light-cone distribution amplitude (LCDA) of the pion contains information about the parton momentum carried by the quarks and is an important theoretical input for various predictions of exclusive processes at high energy, including the pion electromagnetic form factor. Progress towards constraining the fourth Mellin moment of the LCDA using the heavy-quark operator product expansion (HOPE) method is presented.

String vertices of open-closed string field theory on an arbitrary closed string background with \(N\) identical D-branes are investigated when \(N\) is large. We identify the relevant geometric master equation and solve it using open-closed hyperbolic genus zero string vertices with a milder systolic constraint. The limits corresponding to integrating out open or closed strings are investigated. We highlight the possible implications of our construction to AdS/CFT correspondence.

In this work, we present a complete theoretical framework for analyzing the distribution of polarized hadrons within jets, with and without measuring the transverse momentum relative to the standard jet axis. Using soft-collinear effective theory (SCET), we derive the factorization and provide the theoretical calculation of both semi-inclusive and exclusive fragmenting jet functions (FJFs) under longitudinal and transverse polarization. With the polarized FJFs, one gains access to a variety of new observables that can be used for extracting both collinear and transverse momentum dependent parton distribution functions (PDFs) and fragmentation functions (FFs). As examples, we provide numerical results for the spin asymmetry \(A_{TU,T}^{\cos(\phi _S - \hat{\phi}_{S_h})}\) from polarized semi-inclusive hadron-in-jet production in polarized \(pp\) collisions at RHIC kinematics, where a transversely polarized quark would lead to the transverse spin of the final-state hadron inside the jet and is thus sensitive to the transversity fragmentation functions. Similarly, another spin asymmetry, \(A_{TU, L}^{\cos(\phi _q - \phi _{S})}\) from polarized exclusive hadron-in-jet production in polarized \(ep\) collisions at EIC kinematics would allow us to access the helicity fragmentation functions. These observables demonstrate promising potential in investigating transverse momentum dependent PDFs and FFs and are worthwhile for further measurements.

We study the possibility that dark matter re-enters kinetic equilibrium with a radiation bath after kinetic decoupling, a scenario we dub kinetic recoupling. This naturally occurs, for instance, with certain types of resonantly-enhanced interactions, or as the result of a phase transition. While late kinetic decoupling damps structure on small scales below a cutoff, kinetic recoupling produces more complex changes in the power spectrum that depend on the nature and extent of the recoupling period. We explore the features that kinetic recoupling imprints upon the matter power spectrum, and discuss how such features can be traced to dark matter microphysics with future observations.

We derive the finite-temperature quantum-tunneling rate from first principles. The decay rate depends on both real- and imaginary-time; we demonstrate that the relevant instantons should therefore be defined on a Keldysh-Schwinger contour, and how the familiar Euclidean-time result arises from it in the limit of large physical times. We generalize previous results for excited initial states, and identify distinct behavior in the high- and low-temperature limits, incorporating effects from background fields. We construct a consistent perturbative scheme that incorporates large finite-temperature effects.

We review and update constraints on the Early Dark Energy (EDE) model from cosmological data sets, in particular Planck PR3 and PR4 cosmic microwave background (CMB) data and large-scale structure (LSS) data sets including galaxy clustering and weak lensing data from the Dark Energy Survey, Subaru Hyper Suprime-Cam, and KiDS+VIKING-450, as well as BOSS/eBOSS galaxy clustering and Lyman-\(\alpha\) forest data. We detail the fit to CMB data, and perform the first analyses of EDE using the CAMSPEC and Hillipop likelihoods for Planck CMB data, rather than Plik, both of which yield a tighter upper bound on the allowed EDE fraction than that found with Plik. We then supplement CMB data with large-scale structure data in a series of new analyses. All these analyses are concordant in their Bayesian preference for \(\Lambda\)CDM over EDE, as indicated by marginalized posterior distributions. We perform a series of tests of the impact of priors in these results, and compare with frequentist analyses based on the profile likelihood, finding qualitative agreement with the Bayesian results. All these tests suggest prior volume effects are not a determining factor in analyses of EDE. This work provides both a review of existing constraints and several new analyses.

We construct a lattice field theory method for computing the real-time dynamics of spin systems in a thermal bath. This is done by building on previous work of Takano with Schwinger-Keldysh and functional differentiation techniques. We derive a Schwinger-Keldysh path integral for generic spin Hamiltonians, then demonstrate the method on a simple system. Our path integral has a sign problem, which generally requires exponential run time in the system size, but requires only linear storage. The latter may place this method at an advantage over exact diagonalization, which is exponential in both. Our path integral is amenable to contour deformations, a technique for reducing sign problems.

We describe a realistic mechanism whereby black holes with significant QCD color charge could have formed during the early universe. Primordial black holes (PBHs) could make up a significant fraction of the dark matter if they formed well before the QCD confinement transition. Such PBHs would form by absorbing unconfined quarks and gluons, and hence could acquire a net color charge. We estimate the number of PBHs per Hubble volume with near-extremal color charge for various scenarios, and discuss possible phenomenological implications.

We analyze the internal symmetries and their anomalies in the Kitaev spin-\(S\) models. Importantly, these models have a lattice version of a \(\mathbb{Z}_2\) 1-form symmetry, denoted by \(\mathbb{Z}_2^{[1]}\). There is also an ordinary 0-form \(\mathbb{Z}_2^{(x)}\times\mathbb{Z}_2^{(y)}\times\mathbb{Z}_2^T\) symmetry, where \(\mathbb{Z}_2^{(x)}\times\mathbb{Z}_2^{(y)}\) are \(\pi\) spin rotations around two orthogonal axes, and \(\mathbb{Z}_2^T\) is the time reversal symmetry. The anomalies associated with the full \(\mathbb{Z}_2^{(x)}\times\mathbb{Z}_2^{(y)}\times\mathbb{Z}_2^T\times\mathbb{Z}_2^{[1]}\) symmetry are classified by \(\mathbb{Z}_2^{17}\). We find that for \(S\in\mathbb{Z}\) the model is anomaly-free, while for \(S\in\mathbb{Z}+\frac{1}{2}\) there is an anomaly purely associated with the 1-form symmetry, but there is no anomaly purely associated with the ordinary symmetry or mixed anomaly between the 0-form and 1-form symmetries. The consequences of these anomalies apply to not only the Kitaev spin-\(S\) models, but also any of their perturbed versions, assuming that the perturbations are local and respect the symmetries. If these local perturbations are weak, these consequences apply even if the perturbations break the 1-form symmetry. A notable consequence is that there must be a deconfined fermionic excitation carrying no fractional quantum number under the \(\mathbb{Z}_2^{(x)}\times\mathbb{Z}_2^{(y)}\times\mathbb{Z}_2^T\) symmetry if \(S\in\mathbb{Z}+\frac{1}{2}\).