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A bstract Axion-like particles (ALPs) arise in a variety of theoretical contexts and can, in general, mediate flavor violating interactions and parity non-conservation. We consider lepton flavor violating ALPs with GeV scale or larger masses which may, for example, arise in composite dark sector models. We show that a future Electron-Ion Collider (EIC) can uncover or constrain such ALPs via processes of the type e A Z → τ A Z a , where A Z is a nucleus of charge Z and a is an ALP in the range m τ ≤ m a ≲ 20 GeV. The production of the ALP can have a large Z 2 enhancement from low Q 2 electromagnetic scattering of the electron from a heavy ion. Using the gold nucleus ( Z = 79) as an example, we show that the EIC can explore e − τ flavor violation, mediated by GeV-scale ALPs, well beyond current limits. Importantly, the EIC reach for this interaction is not sensitive to the lepton-flavor conserving ALP couplings, whose possible smallness can render searches using τ decays ineffective. We also discuss how the EIC electron beam polarization can provide a powerful tool for investigating parity violating ALPs.

We report preliminary results on the finite temperature behavior of SU(4) gauge theory with dynamical quarks in both the fundamental and two-index antisymmetric representations. This system is a candidate to present scale separation behavior, where fermions in different representations condense at different temperature or coupling scales. Our simulations, however, reveal a single finite-temperature phase transition at which both representations deconfine and exhibit chiral restoration. It appears to be strongly first order. We compare our results to previous single-representation simulations. We also describe a Pisarski-Wilczek stability analysis, which suggests that the transition should be first order.

We discuss the phase diagnostics used in our finite-temperature study of an SU(4) gauge theory with dynamical fermions in both the fundamental and two-index antisymmetric representations. Beyond the usual Polyakov loop diagnostics of confinement, we employ several Wilson flow phase diagnostics. The first, what we call the ‘‘flow anisotropy’’, is known in the literature: the deconfinement transition introduces anisotropy between the spatial and temporal directions, to which the flow is extremely sensitive. The second, the ‘‘long flow time Polyakov loop,’’ is related but novel. While we do not claim to fully understand this diagnostic, we have empirically found it to be useful as an unusually sharp diagnostic of phase.

The process of generating ensembles of gauge configurations (and measuring various observables over them) can be tedious and error-prone when done “by hand”. In practice, most of this procedure can be automated with the use of a workflow manager. We discuss how this automation can be accomplished using Taxi, a minimal Python-based workflow manager built for generating lattice data. We present a case study demonstrating this technology.

Axion-like particles (ALPs) arise in a variety of theoretical contexts and can, in general, mediate flavor violating interactions and parity non-conservation. We consider lepton flavor violating ALPs with GeV scale or larger masses which may, for example, arise in composite dark sector models. We show that a future Electron-Ion Collider (EIC) can uncover or constrain such ALPs via processes of the type e AZ → τ AZ a, where AZ is a nucleus of charge Z and a is an ALP in the range mτ ≤ ma ≲ 20 GeV. The production of the ALP can have a large Z2 enhancement from low Q2 electromagnetic scattering of the electron from a heavy ion. Using the gold nucleus (Z = 79) as an example, we show that the EIC can explore e – τ flavor violation, mediated by GeV-scale ALPs, well beyond current limits. Importantly, the EIC reach for this interaction is not sensitive to the lepton-flavor conserving ALP couplings, whose possible smallness can render searches using τ decays ineffective. We also discuss how the EIC electron beam polarization can provide a powerful tool for investigating parity violating ALPs.

The CDF collaboration has reported a 4.1 σ excess in their lepton, missing energy, and dijets channel. This excess, which takes the form of an approximately Gaussian peak centered at a dijet invariant mass of 147 GeV, has provoked a great deal of experimental and theoretical interest. Although the DØ collaboration has reported that they do not observe a signal consistent with CDF, there is currently no widely accepted explanation for the discrepancy between these two experiments. A resolution of this issue is of great importance — not least because it may teach us lessons relevant for future searches at the LHC — and it will clearly require additional information. In this paper, we consider the ability of the Tevatron and LHC detectors to observe evidence associated with the CDF excess in a variety of channels. We also discuss the ability of selected kinematic distributions to distinguish between Standard Model explanations of the observed excess and various new physics scenarios.

A number of proposed extensions of the Standard Model include new strongly interacting dynamics, in the form of SU(N) gauge fields coupled to various numbers of fermions. Often, these extensions allow N = 3 as a plausible choice, or even require N = 3, such as in twin Higgs models, where the new dynamics is a \"copy\" of QCD. However, the fermion masses in such a sector are typically different from (often heavier than) the ones of real-world QCD, relative to the confinement scale. Many of the strong interaction masses and matrix elements for SU(3) at heavy fermion masses have already been computed on the lattice, typically as a byproduct of the approach to the physical point of real QCD. We provide a summary of these relevant results for the phenomenological community.

We revisit the possibility that light axion-like particles (ALPs) with lepton flavor violating couplings could give significant contributions to the electron's anomalous magnetic moment \\(g_e-2\\). Unlike flavor diagonal lepton-ALP couplings, which are exclusively axial, lepton flavor violating couplings can have arbitrary chirality. Focusing on the \\(e\\)-\\(\\tau\\) ALP coupling, we find that the size of the contribution to \\(g_e-2\\) depends strongly on the chirality of the coupling. A significant part of the parameter space for which such a coupling can explain experimental anomalies in \\(g_e-2\\) can be probed at the Electron-Ion Collider, which is uniquely sensitive to the chirality of the coupling using the polarization of the electron beam.

Bayesian model averaging is a practical method for dealing with uncertainty due to model specification. Use of this technique requires the estimation of model probability weights. In this work, we revisit the derivation of estimators for these model weights. Use of the Kullback-Leibler divergence as a starting point leads naturally to a number of alternative information criteria suitable for Bayesian model weight estimation. We explore three such criteria, known to the statistics literature before, in detail: a Bayesian analogue of the Akaike information criterion which we call the BAIC, the Bayesian predictive information criterion (BPIC), and the posterior predictive information criterion (PPIC). We compare the use of these information criteria in numerical analysis problems common in lattice field theory calculations. We find that the PPIC has the most appealing theoretical properties and can give the best performance in terms of model-averaging uncertainty, particularly in the presence of noisy data, while the BAIC is a simple and reliable alternative.

Model averaging is a useful and robust method for dealing with model uncertainty in statistical analysis. Often, it is useful to consider data subset selection at the same time, in which model selection criteria are used to compare models across different subsets of the data. Two different criteria have been proposed in the literature for how the data subsets should be weighted. We compare the two criteria closely in a unified treatment based on the Kullback-Leibler divergence, and conclude that one of them is subtly flawed and will tend to yield larger uncertainties due to loss of information. Analytical and numerical examples are provided.