Neutrinos—the "little neutral ones" initially conjectured by Pauli in the 1930s—have been eluding scientists since their inception. Even some basic properties, such as their mass, escape experimental confirmation. In my talk, I will discuss how two relatively new quantum-inspired techniques — such cyclotron radiation emission spectroscopy (CRES)-- are being used to better understand the fundamental properties of neutrinos to new, unprecedented levels.
We know that the Standard Model of particle physics is not complete, pointing to the existence of as of yet unknown particles referred to broadly as "new physics". Beauty quarks are the heaviest quarks to hadronise. Precision measurements of observable from beauty quark decays therefore offer a unique probe of the new physics landscape above the TeV scale. In particular, measurements of very rare beauty decays could detect new physics particles with masses of hundreds of TeV. For the last decade, rare beauty decays have shown persist and consistent deviations at the level, of four to five standard deviations from Standard Model expectations. This talk summarises the status of these measurements , and the ongoing work to pin down what is behind these anomalies.
I will discuss a novel technique to perform statistical data analysis. The method is a specific implementation of simulation-based inference for parameter inference in particle and nuclear physics experiments. I will show a real-life application of the new method to a measurement of the Higgs boson width in the H->ZZ->4l decay channel. The application of the new method improves the evidence for off-shell Higgs boson production by almost a factor of two using the same dataset as a previous histogram-based analysis.
Domain wall (DW) networks are interesting probes of new physics with spontaneously broken discrete symmetries. They have a strong impact on cosmology, leading to abundant production of primordial Gravitational Waves (GWs) and Black Holes (PBHs). A detailed knowledge of these signals and how they depend on model parameters, however, represents a computational challenge. I will present a method to capture the GW and PBH yield and I will discuss some phenomenological implications. Within current uncertainties, the DW interpretation of the PTA signal cannot be ruled out by PBH overproduction.
What is the cosmological origin of dark matter? Dark matter may be a thermal relic, with sizable interactions and an equilibrium initial condition. Alternatively, dark matter may have feeble interactions and have never reached equilibrium (as for example in “freeze in” models). In this talk I will discuss some recent ideas for how dark matter could have been produced nonthermally. I will introduce classes of models where dark matter is produced by oscillations, or by a period of exponential growth.
