Small neutrino masses can be generated through the well-known seesaw mechanisms, among which the type-II scenario predicts a triplet scalar with doubly charged components. Except for the Drell-Yan production at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), the doubly charged scalars $\Delta^{\pm\pm}$ can also be produced through photon fusion along with the ultraperipheral collision of protons, from which the outgoing protons can be detected by forward detectors at the LHC, providing a promising means to explore related new physics. We study the pair production through such processes at the 14 TeV LHC, focusing on the final states of $\mu^{+}\mu^{+}\mu^{-}\mu^{-}$ and $e^{+}e^{+}e^{-}e^{-}$ under the normal hierarchy (NH) and inverted hierarchy (IH) of the neutrino mass spectra, respectively. Promising sensitivity can be reached via our proposed search strategy. At a luminosity of 36.1 fb$^{-1}$(100 fb $^{-1}$ ), $m_{\Delta}\sim430(520)$ GeV can be excluded at 95% C.L. under the NH via $\mu^{+}\mu^{+}\mu^{-}\mu^{-}$ state searching, while the mass bound can be extended to 730(880) GeV under the IH via $e^{+}e^{+}e^{-}e^{-}$ states. The exclusion limits on $m_{\Delta}$ can be improved up to 1 TeV and even higher with integrated luminosity accumulated to 3 ab $^{-1}$ .

China

Hang Zhou

Ning Liu

Search for doubly charged scalars in type-II seesaw mechanism through photon fusion at the LHC * Supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (12405118) and the Natural Science Foundation of Jiangsu Province (BK20230623)

We investigate the collider signatures of a maximally flavor-violating $ U(1)_{L_\mu-L_\tau} $ model, where a new gauge boson $ Z^\prime $ and scalar triplets induce lepton flavor-changing interactions in the $\textit{μ}$-$\textit{τ}$ sector. Focusing on four-lepton final states at multi-TeV lepton colliders, we conduct a detailed analysis of cross sections, asymmetries, and polarization effects. We show that the signal cross section is highly sensitive to $ m_{Z^\prime} $ and the effective parameters $ \tilde{g}/m_{Z^\prime} $ , whereas it remains largely insensitive to the triplet Yukawa couplings within the phenomenologically allowed region. The forward-backward asymmetry exhibits a characteristic monotonic dependence on $ m_{Z^\prime} $ , and beam polarization can significantly suppress the Standard Model backgrounds while enhancing new physics contributions. We find that, in the phenomenologically allowed parameter space, the predicted observables remain highly sensitive to the underlying model parameters. These results show that multi-lepton final states are powerful probes of the $ U(1)_{L\mu - L_\tau} $ framework and can offer valuable guidance for future searches at muon and electron-positron colliders.

Jianing Qin

Fei Huang

Honglei Li

Zhi-Long Han

Jin Sun

Collider probes of four-lepton final states in maximally flavor-violating ${U(1)_{L_\mu-L_\tau}} $ model * Supported by National Natural Science Foundation of China (12505112, 11805081), Shandong Province Natural Science Foundation (ZR2024QA138, ZR2022MA056) and State Key Laboratory of Dark Matter Physics, University of Jinan Disciplinary Cross-Convergence Construction Project 2024 (XKJC- 202404) and Jin Sun is supported by IBS under the project code, (IBS-R018-D1)

We investigate thermal photon production in the quark-gluon plasma (QGP) under strong magnetic fields using a magnetohydrodynamic (MHD) framework. We employ relativistic ideal fluid dynamics under the non-resistive approximation by adopting the Bjorken flow model with power-law decaying magnetic fields $ \mathbf{B}(\tau) = \mathbf{B}_0 (\tau_0/\tau)^a $ , span> $\textit{a}$ controls the decay rate, $ B_0 = \sqrt{\sigma} T_0^2 $ , and $\textit{σ}$ characterizes the initial field strength. The resulting QGP temperature evolution exhibits distinct $\textit{a}$- and $\textit{σ}$-dependent behaviors. Thermal photon production rates are calculated for three dominant processes: Compton scattering with $ q\bar{q} $ annihilation (C+A), bremsstrahlung (Brems), and $ q\bar{q} $ annihilation with additional scattering (A+S). These rates are integrated over the space-time volume to obtain the photon transverse momentum $ (p_T) $ spectrum. Our results demonstrate that increasing $\textit{a}$ enhances photon yields across all $ p_T $ , with $ a \to \infty $ (super-fast decay) providing an upper bound. For $ a = 2/3 $ , a larger $\textit{σ}$ suppresses yields through accelerated cooling, whereas for $ a \to \infty $ , a larger $\textit{σ}$ enhances yields via prolonged thermal emission. Low- $ p_T $ photons receive significant contributions from all QGP evolution stages, while high- $ p_T $ photons originate predominantly from early times. The central rapidity region $ (y=0) $ dominates the total yield. This work extends the photon yield studies to the MHD regime under strong magnetic fields, clarifying the magnetic field effects on QGP electromagnetic signatures and establishing foundations for future investigations of magnetization and dissipative phenomena.

Jie Xiong

Xiang Fan

Jing Jing

Weishan Yang

Duan She

Ze-Fang Jiang

Thermal photon emission from quark-gluon plasma: 1+1D magnetohydrodynamics results * Supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (NSFC) (12305138). Duan She's research is funded by the Startup Research Fund of Henan Academy of Sciences (231820058) and the 2024 Henan Province International Science and Technology Cooperation Projects (242102521068)

We investigated the effect of an isospin chemical potential ( $ \mu_{I} $ ) within the quark-meson model, which approximates quantum chromodynamics (QCD) by modeling low-energy phenomena such as chiral symmetry breaking and phase structure under varying conditions of temperature and chemical potential. Using the functional renormalization group (FRG) flow equations, we calculated the phase diagram in the chiral limit within the two-flavor quark-meson model in a finite $ \mu_{I} $ with $\textit{ρ}$ vector meson interactions. Fluctuation effects significantly decrease the critical chemical potential from the mean-field (MF) value $\mu_{I,{\rm MF}} \gt m_\rho$ to a lower value at which the $\textit{ρ}$ vector meson condensates alongside the chiral condensate once the isospin chemical potential exceeds the critical value $ \mu_{I}^{{\rm{crit}}} $ . This $\textit{ρ}$ condensation was investigated numerically for different meson coupling strengths. The $\textit{ρ}$ meson dominated region is delineated from other phases by a second-order phase transition at lower $ \mu_{I} $ and a first-order transition at slightly higher $ \mu_{I} $ .

Mohammed Osman

Defu Hou

Wentao Wang

United States

Hui Zhang

Functional renormalization group study of $\textit{ρ}$ meson condensate at a finite isospin chemical potential in the quark meson model * Supported in part by the National Key Research and Development Program of China (2022YFA1604900). This work is also partly supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (NSFC) (12435009, 12275104). Hui Zhang acknowledges the financial support from the Guangdong Major Project of Basic and Applied Basic Research (2020B0301030008) and the National Natural Science Foundation of China (12047523, 12105107)

Several possible excesses around $ 95 $ GeV hint at an additional light scalar beyond the Standard Model. We examine the capability of the Circular Electron-Positron Collider (CEPC) to test this hypothesis in the Higgs-strahlung channel $ e^{+}e^{-} \to ZS $ with $ Z \to\mu^{+}\mu^{-} $ and $ S \to\tau^{+}\tau^{-} $ . A full detector simulation shows that the optimal center-of-mass energy for studying the 95 GeV light scalar is 210 GeV. A deep neural network classifier reduces the luminosity required for discovery by half. At $ L = 20\; \mathrm{ab}^{-1} $ , the $ 5\sigma $ sensitivity of the CEPC to the signal strength $ \mu_{\tau\tau}^{ZS} $ reaches 0.016 and 0.020 for $ \sqrt{s} = 210 $ GeV and 240 GeV, respectively. The corresponding thresholds for a 5% precision measurement are $ \mu_{\tau\tau}^{ZS} \gt 0.10 $ and $ \gt 0.12 $ . At $ \sqrt{s}=210 $ GeV (240 GeV), the $ 5\sigma $ coverage of all N2HDM-Flipped samples with $ \chi^2_{h_{95}} \lt 7.82 $ requires $ L=800\ \mathrm{fb}^{-1} $ (1.22 $ \mathrm{ab}^{-1} $ ). These results establish a 210 GeV run, augmented by machine-learning selection, as the most efficient strategy to confirm or refute the 95 GeV excess at future lepton colliders.

Yabo Dong

Manqi Ruan

Kun Wang

Haijun Yang

Jingya Zhu

Testing a 95 GeV Scalar at the CEPC with Machine Learning * This work was supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China under Grant No. 12275066 and by the startup research funds of Henan University. The work of K. Wang was also supported by the Open Project of the Shanghai Key Laboratory of Particle Physics and Cosmology under Grant No. 22DZ2229013-3. The work of M. Ruan was also supported by the National Key Program for S&T Research and Development under Contract No. 2024YFA1610603. The work of H. Yang was also supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China under Grant No. W2441004.

Off-shell characteristics of pion generalized parton distributions (GPDs) and transverse momentum dependent parton distributions (TMDs) are examined within the framework of the Nambu–Jona-Lasinio model. In our previous studies, we separately investigated the properties of on-shell pion GPDs and light-front wave functions. Comparing the differences between on-shell and off-shell pion GPDs is particularly intriguing becuase it enables us to explore the effects associated with off-shellness. The absence of crossing symmetry causes the moments of GPDs to incorporate odd powers of the skewness parameter, resulting in new off-shell form factors. Through our calculations, we derived correction functions that account for modifications in pion GPDs attributed to off-shell effects. Unlike their on-shell counterparts, certain properties break down in the off-shell scenario; for example, symmetry properties and polynomiality conditions may no longer hold. In addition, we evaluate off-shell TMDs and compare them with their on-shell equivalents while also investigating their dependence on $ {\boldsymbol{k}}_{\perp} $ .

Jin-Li Zhang

Off-shell modifications of pion generalized parton distributions and transverse momentum dependent parton distributions * Supported by the Scientific Research Foundation of Nanjing Institute of Technology (YKJ202352) and the General Program of the Natural Science Foundation of Jiangsu Higher Education Institutions (25KJD140001)

Inspired by the observation of the ${\eta}_{t}$ meson at the LHC and the promising prospect of the ${\eta}_{t}$ meson available at the approaching HL-LHC, branching ratios for the ${\eta}_{t}$ ${\to}$ $f\bar{f}$ , $gg$ , ${\gamma}{\gamma}$ , $W^{+}W^{-}$ , $Z^{0}Z^{0}$ , $Z^{0}{\gamma}$ , and $Z^{0}H$ decays are roughly estimated. It is found that tens of opposite-charge dilepton events from the ${\eta}_{t}$ ${\to}$ $W^{+}W^{-}$ decay and hundreds of events from the ${\eta}_{t}$ ${\to}$ $Z^{0}H$ ${\to}$ ${\ell}^{+}{\ell}^{-}H$ decay using the single $Z^{0}$ boson tagging method are expected to be accessible. This estimation provides a reference for future experimental study on the ${\eta}_{t}$ meson.

Yueling Yang

Bingbing Yang

Jiazhi Li

Zhaojie Lü

Junfeng Sun

Searching for the toponium ${{\boldsymbol\eta}_{\boldsymbol t}}$ with the ${{\boldsymbol\eta}_{\boldsymbol t}}$ ${\boldsymbol\to}$ ${{\boldsymbol W}^{\bf +}{\boldsymbol W}^{\bf -}}$ decay * Supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (12275068, 12275067), the National Key R&D Program of China (2023YFA1606000), the Natural Science Foundation of Henan Province (252300421491, 242300420250), and the Science and Technology R&D Program Joint Fund Project of Henan Province (225200810030), as well as the Science and Technology Innovation Leading Talent Support Program of Henan Province (254200510039)

We investigate the discovery prospects of a leptophilic gauge boson $ Z_\ell $ at future $ e^+e^- $ colliders, focusing on a comparative study of the Circular Electron–Positron Collider (CEPC) and the International Linear Collider (ILC). Such a state naturally arises from an additional $ U(1)'_\ell $ gauge symmetry, under which quarks remain neutral while all leptons carry a universal charge, motivated by neutrino oscillations and scenarios of physics beyond the Standard Model. As a clean benchmark, we study the process $ e^+e^- \to \mu^+\mu^- $ , including realistic effects of initial-state radiation and beamstrahlung. Our results indicate that the CEPC, with its very high luminosity at $ \sqrt{s}=240 $ GeV, can probe couplings down to $ g_\ell \approx 10^{-3} $ for $ Z_\ell $ masses up to about 220 GeV. The ILC extends the sensitivity to heavier states in the multi-hundred GeV range through its higher $ \sqrt{s} $ stages. These findings demonstrate the strong complementarity of circular and linear colliders in exploring purely leptophilic interactions.

S.O. Kara

Discovery prospects for a leptophilic gauge boson Z$_{ℓ}$ at CEPC and ILC

Heavy Majorana neutrinos ($\textit{N}$) are predicted in many models of physics beyond the Standard Model. In this work, we explore the production and detection prospects of TeV-scale heavy neutrinos ( $ m_N \gtrsim 1 $ TeV) at a future 3 TeV Compact Linear Collider (CLIC). We focus on two distinct decay topologies: (i) $ N \to \ell^\pm W^\mp $ with hadronic $\textit{W}$ boson decay, leading to a final state with one charged lepton and a hadronic fat jet $ J_W $ ; and (ii) $ N \to \nu h $ with subsequent Higgs decay $ h \to b\bar{b} $ , yielding a Higgs-tagged fat jet $ J_h $ and $\not {E}_T$ . Based on comprehensive detector-level simulations and background analysis, we present both $ 2\sigma $ exclusion limits and $ 5\sigma $ discovery reaches in the $ m_N $ – $ |V_{\ell N}|^2 $ plane. We further extract 95% confidence level upper limits on the mixing parameter $ |V_{\ell N}|^2 $ and perform a detailed comparison with existing constraints from direct searches at future colliders and indirect global fits. Our findings demonstrate that a 3 TeV CLIC can improve the sensitivity to $ |V_{\ell N}|^2 $ by about two orders of magnitude compared with the projected reaches of future hadron colliders while remaining competitive with other CLIC search channels.

Yao-Bei Liu

Jing-Wei Lian

Searches for heavy neutrinos at a 3 TeV CLIC in fat jet final states * Yao-Bei Liu is supported by the Natural Science Foundation of Henan Province, China (252300421988), Jing-Wei Lian is supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (12447140) and the Natural Science Foundation of Henan Province, China (252300421771)

One-loop contributions for the decay process $ H^{\pm} \rightarrow W^{\pm}Z $ within the Two-Higgs-Doublet Model (THDM) are computed in the general $ {\cal{R}}_{\xi} $ gauge, and its phenomenological applications at future muon–TeV colliders are investigated. Analytic results are confirmed by several consistency tests, including those of $\textit{ξ}$-independence, renormalization-scale stability, and the ultraviolet finiteness of the one-loop amplitude. We first perform an updated parameter scan of the Type-X THDM in phenomenological studies. The production of charged Higgs boson pairs at future muon–TeV colliders is then investigated through two processes: $ \mu^+\mu^- \rightarrow H^+H^- \rightarrow W^{\pm}W^{\mp}Zh $ and $ \mu^+\mu^- \rightarrow \gamma\gamma \rightarrow H^+H^- \rightarrow W^{\pm}W^{\mp}Zh $ . Both signal events and their significance are evaluated considering the corresponding Standard Model backgrounds. We find that the signal significances can exceed $ 5\sigma $ at several benchmark points in the viable parameter space of the Type-X THDM.

Vietnam

Dzung Tri Tran

Quang Hoang-Minh Pham

Khoa Ngo-Thanh Ho

Khiem Hong Phan

One-loop expressions for ${H^\pm \rightarrow W^\pm Z} $ and their implications at muon-TeV colliders * This research is funded by Vietnam National Foundation for Science and Technology Development (NAFOSTED) (103.01-2023.16)