In this paper, we systematically explore the mass spectrum of fully strange tetraquark candidates within the framework of QCD sum rules, focusing on states with quantum numbers $ J^{PC}=0^{++} $ , $ 0^{-+} $ , $ 0^{--} $ , $ 1^{--} $ , $ 1^{+-} $ , and $ 1^{++} $ . The analysis reveals the existence of fully strange tetraquark states with masses ranging from approximately $ 2.07 $ to $ 3.12 $ GeV. These predictions are compared with existing experimental observations of potential fully strange tetraquark resonances, notably the $ X(2300) $ recently reported by the BESIII Collaboration, which may be interpreted as a fully strange tetraquark state. Furthermore, the possible decay modes of these fully strange tetraquark states are analyzed, providing guidance for their identification in current and future high-energy experiments, such as BESIII, Belle II, and LHCb.

China

Bing-Dong Wan

Ji-Chong Yang

Fully strange tetraquark states via QCD sum rules * Supported in part by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (12575106, 12147214) and Specific Fund of Fundamental Scientific Research Operating Expenses for Undergraduate Universities in Liaoning Province (LJ212410165019)

In this study, we investigate the possibility of enhancing the di-jet resonance searches by tagging the final state radiation (FSR) jet using an event-level deep neural network. It is found that solely relying on the 4-momenta of the leading three jets allows the algorithm to achieve good discriminating power that can identify the hardest FSR jet in the signal while rejecting other soft jets. Once the invariant mass is corrected with the tagged FSR jet, the mass resolution of the signal is greatly enhanced, and the sensitivity of the search is also improved by more than 10%. By crafting the input variables carefully, the algorithm introduces minimal mass sculpting for the background, and its applicability extends to a broad mass range. This work proves that FSR jet tagging can potentially enhance di-jet resonance searches, suiting various stages of the physics programmes at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) and High-Luminosity LHC (HL-LHC).

Bingxuan Liu

Yuxuan Shen

Yuanshunzi Sui

Enhancing di-jet resonance searches via a final-state radiation jet tagging algorithm * Bingxuan Liu is supported by Shenzhen Campus of the Sun Yat-sen University under project 74140-12255011, and by the Young Scientists Fund (C Class) of the National Natural Science Foundation of China (12405122). Both Yuxuan Shen and Yuanshunzi Sui are supported by College Students’ Innovative Entrepreneurial Training Plan Program

Jet quenching is studied in a background magnetic field and finite baryon chemical potential. The production of energetic partons is calculated using the next-to-leading order (NLO) perturbative Quantum Chromodynamics (pQCD) parton model, whereas the parton energy loss formula is obtained from the AdS/CFT correspondence incorporating the magnetic field and baryon chemical potential effects. Using Bayesian inference, we systemically compare theoretical calculations with experimental data for the nuclear modification factor $ R_{AA}$ of large transverse momentum hadrons in different centralities of nucleus-nucleus collisions at 0.2, 2.76, and 5.02 TeV, respectively. The holographic calculation leads to a strong negative correlation between the magnetic field and chemical potential for a fixed amount of energy loss. This degeneracy can be observed after model calibration. Finally, we discussed the sensitivity of jet quenching phenomena to the external magnetic field and background baryon chemical potential.

Liqiang Zhu

Zhan Gao

Weiyao Ke

Hanzhong Zhang

Bayesian inference of the magnetic field and chemical potential on holographic jet quenching in heavy-ion collisions * Supported by National Natural Science Foundation of China (12535010, 11935007)

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 $^{-1}$ .

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)

In the recent years, argon-based experiments looking for Dark Matter in the Universe have explored the non-standard scenario in which Dark Matter is made by low-mass Weakly Interacting Massive Particles, of mass in the range of 1–10 GeV instead of the canonical hundreds of GeV. Detecting such particles is challenging, as their expected signatures are nuclear recoils with energies below 10 keV, observable solely via ionization. This necessitates a precise understanding of the detector response in this energy regime, which remains incomplete for argon. To address this, the ReD experiment was developed within the framework of the DarkSide-20k Collaboration to produce and characterize few-keV nuclear recoils. A compact dual-phase argon Time Projection Chamber (TPC) was irradiated with neutrons from a $$^{252}$$ Cf source, to produce Ar recoils in the energy range of interest via (n,n’) elastic scattering. A downstream spectrometer composed of 18 plastic scintillators detected the neutrons scattered off Ar nuclei, enabling recoil energy reconstruction via two-body kinematics. The ionization yield $$Q_{y}$$ of argon, defined as the number of electrons produced per unit energy deposit, was measured in a model-independent way between 2 and 10 keV. These measurements extend direct experimental coverage well below the previous limit of approximately 7 keV. The results are consistent with existing data above 7 keV, while they indicate a higher $$Q_{y}$$ at lower energies.

Italy

P. Agnes

Poland

I. Ahmad

S. Albergo

Brazil

I. Albuquerque

M. Corona

M. Ave

B. Bottino

M. Cadeddu

A. Caminata

N. Canci

M. Caravati

L. Consiglio

S. Davini

L. Dias

Russia

G. Dolganov

G. Fiorillo

France

D. Franco

M. Gulino

T. Hessel

N. Kemmerich

M. Kimura

M. Kuźniak

M. La Commara

J. Machts

G. Matteucci

E. Santos

E. Nikoloudaki

V. Oleynikov

L. Pandola

R. Varona

N. Pino

S. Puglia

M. Rescigno

B. Costa

S. Sanfilippo

A. Sung

C. Sunny

Y. Suvorov

R. Tartaglia

G. Testera

A. Tricomi

M. Wada

Y. Wang

R. Wojaczyński

P. Zakhary

Characterization of the ionization response of argon to nuclear recoils at the keV scale with the ReD experiment

Baryons in the holographic Witten-Sakai-Sugimoto model are described by instanton solutions on the flavor branes. A commonly used approximation for dense baryonic matter replaces the many-instanton solution by a simpler, spatially homogeneous, ansatz, which requires a discontinuity in the holographic direction of the non-abelian gauge field in order to account for topological baryon number. We point out that the simplest configuration with a single jump — often used in previous studies — results in matter at saturation density that is much stiffer than real-world nuclear matter. This is improved, although not completely remedied, by adding a second jump. We present a systematic discussion of all possible configurations up to four jumps, dynamically computing locations of and behavior at the discontinuities. We find solutions that continuously connect to those based on pointlike baryons, thus, for the first time, establishing a concrete link between the instantonic and homogeneous pictures. This is supported by translating the multi-jump profiles of the gauge field into gauge invariant multi-layer charge distributions. The most important of our novel configurations has a block-like structure in the bulk, becomes pointlike at low density and/or large coupling, and is energetically preferred over all previously studied configurations. Therefore, our work lays the ground for improved predictions from holography for dense nuclear matter in neutron stars.

Germany

Christian Ecker

Argentina

Nicolas Kovensky

United Kingdom

Orestis Papadopoulos

Andreas Schmitt

Softening holographic nuclear matter

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.