The Circular Electron Positron Collider (CEPC) distributes a reference clock distributed to 192 control nodes along its 100~km underground tunnel. The required synchronization precision is 30~ps (standard deviation). We present an enhanced White Rabbit (WR)-based clock synchronization system designed to meet this requirement. A noise-budget analysis of the standard WR slave loop identifies the analog actuation chain (DAC + VCXO + multiplier PLL) and restart-induced timing uncertainty as the dominant limitations. In our redesigned node, the DAC+VCXO chain is replaced by a Si5345A DSPLL clock generator with DCO-based phase control, removing the board-level analog tuning stage. GTX transceiver phase alignment and manual byte-alignment fixing reduce restart uncertainty from 88.8~ps to 12~ps peak-to-peak. For multi-node operation, we introduce a cascaded global-control architecture with PC-side PID auto-tuned by TD3 reinforcement learning, on-chip-temperature feed-forward calibrated to $-0.76\,\mathrm{ps}/^\circ\mathrm{C}$. The measured point-to-point synchronization precision is 3.38~ps over 1~m fiber and 3.92~ps over 50~km. In a 12-level cascade, the end-node precision reaches 6.66~ps at constant temperature and 7.30~ps under a 13$\,^\circ$C temperature swing. Synchronized-clock TIE jitter stays below 1~ps regardless of cascade depth. Restart uncertainty is 2.82~ps (std.\ dev.). A 4-level cascade operated stably for 25 hours of continuous monitoring. All measured metrics fall well within the CEPC 30~ps budget.

Using a dataset of 7.33 fb$^{-1}$ of $e^+ e^-$ annihilation data collected with the BESIII detector at center-of-mass energies from 4.128 to 4.226 GeV, we report an updated measurement of the branching fraction of $D_s^+ \to \tau^+ \nu_{\tau}$ via four $\tau^+$ decay modes: $\tau^+ \to e^+ \nu_e \bar{\nu}_{\tau}$, $\mu^+ \nu_{\mu} \bar{\nu}_{\tau}$, $\pi^+\bar{\nu}_{\tau}$, and $\pi^+ \pi^{0} \bar{\nu}_{\tau}$. The branching fraction is determined to be $\mathcal{B}({D_s^+ \to \tau^+ \nu_{\tau}}) = (5.37 \pm 0.08_{\rm stat} \pm 0.06_{\rm syst})$ %. The product of the modulus of the Cabibbo-Kobayashi-Maskawa matrix element $|V_{cs}|$ and the $D_s^+$ decay constant $f_{D_s^+}$ is measured to be $f_{D_s^+} |V_{cs}| = (248.2 \pm 1.9_{\rm stat} \pm 1.4_{\rm syst} \pm 0.6_{\rm input} \pm 0.8_{\rm EM})$ MeV. Both the branching fraction and the product $f_{D_s^+} |V_{cs}|$ are the most precise results yet obtained. Then, taking $f_{D_s^+}$ from lattice quantum chromodynamics calculations results in $|V_{cs}| = 0.993 \pm 0.008_{\rm stat} \pm 0.006_{\rm syst} \pm 0.003_{\rm input} \pm 0.003_{\rm EM}$. Conversely, one finds $f_{D_s^+} = (255.0 \pm 1.9_{\rm stat} \pm 1.4_{\rm syst} \pm 0.6_{\rm input} \pm 0.8_{\rm EM})$ MeV when taking $|V_{cs}|$ from the CKMfitter group as an input. Combining with the world average value of $D_s^+ \to \mu^+ \nu_{\mu}$, the ratio of the branching fractions between $D_s^+ \to \tau^+ \nu_{\tau}$ and $D_s^+ \to \mu^+ \nu_{\mu}$ is estimated to be $10.04 \pm 0.29$, which is consistent with the Standard Model prediction of lepton flavor universality.

A measurement of the ratio of semileptonic branching fractions $\mathcal{R}(Jψ)$, defined as $\mathcal{R}(J/ψ) \equiv \mathcal{B}(B_c^+ \to J/ψτ^+ ν_τ)/\mathcal{B}(B_c^+ \to J/ψμ^+ ν_μ)$, is reported using a sample of proton-proton collision data corresponding to an integrated luminosity of 5.4 fb$^{-1}$ recorded by the LHCb experiment in 2016--2018 at a center-of-mass energy of 13 TeV. The measured value is found to be $\mathcal{R}(J/ψ) = 0.51 \pm 0.12\text{(stat)} \pm 0.08\text{(syst)}$, which is within 1.8 standard deviations of the predictions from the Standard Model assuming lepton flavor universality.

Using a direct scan of 26 energy points near the $J/\psi$ resonance, we perform the first measurement of the relative phase $\phi_{\gamma, 3g}$ between the strong and electromagnetic amplitudes in $J/\psi\to\bar K^0 K^*(892)^0+c.c.$ and $J/\psi\to K^+ K^*(892)^-+c.c.$. Unexpectedly, the phase in the neutral channel is found to be $\sim 150^\circ$, deviating from orthogonality ($90^\circ$) by 4.2$\sigma$ and from a relative real amplitude (0$^\circ$ or 180$^\circ$) by 10.0$\sigma$ or 1.6$\sigma$, respectively. In contrast, the charged channel phase is consistent with $\sim 180^\circ$ within 1$\sigma$, exhibiting model-dependent behavior. The corresponding branching fractions are consistent with the world averages but achieve better than twofold improvement in precision. The ratios between the branching fractions of $J/\psi\to\bar K^0 K^*(892)^0+c.c.$ and $J/\psi\to K^+ K^*(892)^-+c.c.$ are also measured. After subtracting the electromagnetic contribution, the corresponding strong amplitude ratios obey isospin symmetry within $1.8\sigma$. A search for direct $CP$ violation yields asymmetries consistent with zero.

The $\eta$ and $\eta^{\prime}$ mesons are nearly unique in the particle universe since they are nearly Goldstone bosons, and their decay dynamics are strongly constrained. While earlier experiments collected samples of order $\sim 10^{9}$ $\eta$, the proposed REDTOP (Rare Eta Decays To Observe Physics Beyond the Standard Model) facility targets $\mathcal{O}(10^{14})$ $\eta$ and $\mathcal{O}(10^{12})$ $\eta'$, enabling broad searches for physics beyond the Standard Model. In this work, we present studies evaluating REDTOP sensitivity to processes that couple the Standard Model to New Physics through four portals: the Vector (dark photon), the Scalar (Higgs-mixing), the Axion-like, and the Heavy Lepton. In parallel, the proposed statistics allow precise tests of $CP$ and $T$ invariance and lepton universality and improve determinations of the $\eta/\eta'$ transition form factors, which are crucial inputs to the hadronic light-by-light contribution to the muon anomalous magnetic moment $(g-2)_\mu$.

The detection of astrophysical neutrino point sources remains challenging due to atmospheric backgrounds obscuring signal and statistical penalties from the look-elsewhere effect. The Tau Air-shower Mountain-Based Observatory (TAMBO) is a neutrino telescope that achieves unprecedented signal-to-background discrimination in the 1-1000 PeV energy range. Leveraging its unique deep valley geometry, TAMBO will generate an exceptionally pure neutrino sample, enabling precise investigations of neutrino sources. Preliminary sensitivity studies demonstrate TAMBO's potential to map diffuse and point-source neutrino emissions, representing a significant advancement in high-energy neutrino astronomy.

Multipartite entanglement is a uniquely quantum form of correlation that captures collective properties of a composite quantum state beyond those encoded in its bipartite subsystems. We investigate this phenomenon in the process $e^+e^-\to t\bar tZ$ at a future lepton collider, where the final state spins span the tripartite Hilbert space $\mathscr{H}=\mathbb{C}^{2}\otimes\mathbb{C}^{2}\otimes\mathbb{C}^{3}$. Starting from the Standard Model helicity amplitudes, we reconstruct the full $12\times 12$ spin density matrix and characterise its entanglement structure through one-to-one negativities, one-to-other negativities, and the genuine multipartite negativity, evaluated at three increasingly inclusive levels of phase space integration. Pairwise entanglement is generally suppressed relative to the collective (one-to-other) and the genuine multipartite entanglement, and all measures decrease as more kinematic information is integrated out. Assuming quantum tomography in the fully leptonic decay channel at $\sqrt{s}=1$ TeV, we find that the collective entanglement is accessible at a realistic high-luminosity polarised lepton collider, while a direct observation of genuine multipartite entanglement is challenging and would benefit from further optimisation of the event analysis and observable choice. The study establishes $e^+e^-\to t\bar tZ$ as an attractive laboratory for probing multipartite entanglement in high-energy collisions and provides a general mixed state framework that applies to any tripartite spin system.

We introduce SPADE (SPlit And Delay Embeddings), an autoregressive transformer for sequences whose tokens carry multiple features. Rather than embedding these features jointly, SPADE embeds them independently. Delaying each feature stream relative to the previous one allows intra-token correlations to be learned by the standard self-attention mechanism. Applied to point-cloud calorimeter shower generation in the highly granular ILD detector, SPADE is competitive with the state of the art AllShowers model on photon showers, and substantially outperforms its VQ-VAE-based predecessor OmniJet-$\alpha_C$. The mechanism is applicable to any generative task with multi-feature tokens, enabling LLM-style pretraining workflows for higher-dimensional data.

We investigate $J/\psi$ photoproduction off the proton, $\gamma p \to J/\psi p$, to elucidate the nonexistence of hidden-charm pentaquark signals reported by the GlueX and CLAS12 experiments. Within a coupled-channel rescattering mechanism, we employ the transition amplitudes from a previous coupled-channel analysis that dynamically generates the $P_{c\bar{c}}$ states. The kernel amplitudes for the transition to the $J/\psi N$ channel include both $t$-channel heavy-meson exchange and $u$-channel heavy-baryon exchange. We find that the rescattering contributions from the $\bar{D}^{(*)}\Sigma_c$ channels -- indispensable for the formation of the $P_{c\bar{c}}$ resonances -- are about one order of magnitude smaller than those from $\bar{D}^{(*)}\Lambda_c$, since $g_{\bar{D}^{(*)}N\Sigma_c}$ is roughly five times smaller than $g_{\bar{D}^{(*)}N\Lambda_c}$. Since the $P_{c\bar{c}}$ resonances couple to the $J/\psi N$ channel predominantly through the $\bar{D}^{(*)}\Sigma_c$ intermediate states, their suppression prevents the pentaquark signal from appearing in photoproduction. With only a single parameter controlling the overall normalization, the present work describes the GlueX and CLAS12 cross sections well. These results suggest that the null result from photoproduction need not be in conflict with the pentaquark signals observed by the LHCb Collaboration.

The Schiff moment of a nucleus is a symmetry-violating nuclear moment that indicates new physics beyond the Standard Model. We place the limit, $|\mathscr{S}({}^{153}$Eu)$| < 1.7 \times 10^{-8}$ $e\,$fm$^3$ (95\% confidence), on the Schiff moment of the $^{153}$Eu nucleus, using nuclear spin resonances in two ensembles of oppositely-polarized $^{153}$Eu$^{3+}$ ions in a Y${}_2$SiO${}_5$ crystal. This measurement using octupolar nuclei in a mm-scale crystal constrains new physics at the TeV energy-scale.

Measurements of SIDIS multiplicities for $\pi^+$ and $\pi^-$ from proton and deuteron targets are reported on a grid of hadron kinematic variables $z$, $P_{T}$, and $\phi^{*}$ for leptonic kinematic variables in the range $0.3<x<0.6$ and $3<Q^2<5$ GeV$^2$. Data were acquired in 2018-2019 at Jefferson Lab Hall C with a 10.6~GeV electron beam impinging on 10-cm-long liquid hydrogen and deuterium targets. Scattered electrons and charged pions were detected in the HMS and SHMS spectrometers, respectively. The multiplicities were fitted for each bin in $(x,~Q^2,~z,~P_{t})$ to extract the $\phi^{*}$ independent $M_0$ and the azimuthal modulations $\langle \cos(\phi^{*}) \rangle$ and $\langle \cos(2\phi^{*}) \rangle$. The $P_t$-dependence of the $M_0$ results was found to be remarkably consistent for the four cases studied: $ep\rightarrow e \pi^+ X$, $ep\rightarrow e \pi^- X$, $ed\rightarrow e \pi^+ X$, $ed\rightarrow e \pi^- X$ over the range $0<P_t<0.4$ GeV, as were the multiplicities evaluated near $\phi^* = 180^\circ$ over the extended range $0<P_t<0.7$ GeV. The Gaussian widths of the $P_t$-dependence exhibit a quadratic increase with $z$. The $\cos(\phi^{*})$ modulations were found to be consistent with zero for $\pi^+$, in agreement with previous world data, while the $\pi^-$ moments were, in many cases, significantly greater than zero. The $\cos(2\phi^{*})$ modulations were found to be consistent with zero. The higher statistical precision of this dataset compared to previously published data should allow improved determinations of quark transverse momentum distributions and higher twist contributions.

A search is conducted for standard model Higgs bosons with large transverse momentum ($p_\mathrm{T}$) decaying to bottom quark pairs and produced in association with a hadronically decaying W or Z boson at the LHC. The result is based on a dataset of proton-proton collisions at a center-of-mass energy of 13 TeV collected with the CMS detector in 2016$-$2018, corresponding to an integrated luminosity of 138 fb$^{-1}$. Boosted Higgs, W, and Z boson decays are reconstructed using large-radius jets with $p_\mathrm{T}$ $\gt$ 450 GeV and identified with heavy-flavor classifiers based on a graph convolutional neural network. The observed signal strength relative to the standard model expectation is $\mu$ = 0.72 $^{+0.75}_{-0.71}$ including statistical and systematic uncertainties.

A search is presented for massive long-lived particles in events featuring at least one displaced vertex and at least one displaced muon, using proton-proton collision data collected by the ATLAS detector at the Large Hadron Collider from 2022 to 2024 at a centre-of-mass energy of 13.6 TeV. The data sample corresponds to an integrated luminosity of 164 fb$^{-1}$. The analysis targets scenarios in which long-lived particles decay inside the ATLAS inner detector, resulting in a topology of at least one massive, displaced vertex (DV) with multiple associated tracks, and at least one muon with a large transverse impact parameter relative to the primary interaction point. The muon is not required to be associated with the DV. Two signal regions are defined by the transverse distance of the reconstructed DV from the interaction point. Background contributions are estimated by using fully data-driven techniques. No significant excess above the expected background is observed. Upper limits at 95% confidence level are set on the visible cross-section and on the production cross-sections of several benchmark models of $R$-parity-violating supersymmetry.

The spectral function of the charged pion form factor was extracted from two data sets. The difference between the two sets is based on the presence or absence of the recent measurement of the $\pi^+ \pi^-$ production by CMD-3. Although the CMD-3 data are largely incompatible with other recent measurements, no excess was found when the data were used for analytical continuation to the spacelike region and compared to JLaB-$\pi$ experiment. Instead, both data sets provide a spacelike form factor that differs from the expected behavior known from perturbative analyses of quantum chromodynamics (QCD). A precise fit of the spectral functions is provided, either based on he bare form factor and the full $e^+e^-\rightarrow \pi^+\pi^-$ as well. Furthermore, the extracted pionic spectral functions were used to obtain the QED running charge. This was then compared with the KLOE-2 measurements.

A method for selecting and/or rejecting leptons from charm semileptonic decays based on the tagging of the secondary vertex using a hadron track is introduced. The method is developed for dimuon Drell-Yan measurements in LHCb using full simulations in proton-proton collisions at $\sqrt{s}=13.6$ TeV. We focus on the invariant mass range between 2.9 and 5 GeV/$c^2$ with single muon transverse momentum larger than 1 GeV/$c$. A novel strategy is detailed for background rejection, achieving an improvement of the signal over background of a factor $\sim 4$ at an efficiency of 81% while maintaining the Drell-Yan kinematic distributions largely unbiased except at the acceptance edges. Moreover, a second approach is presented for the construction of unbiased background-pure samples of single muons from charm decays, achieving a charm efficiency of 21.4% at a Drell-Yan efficiency of 1.1%.

Wilson coefficients in dimension-six effective field theory are constrained in a combined fit to several ATLAS measurements. These inputs probe Higgs-boson processes across multiple production and decay modes, di-Higgs signatures in the $b\bar{b}\gamma\gamma$ and $b\bar{b}\tau\tau$ final states, $WW$ and $WZ$ diboson signatures, electroweak $Zjj$ final states, high-mass Drell-Yan interactions, and $t \bar t$ events in both resolved and boosted topologies. Precision electroweak observables from LEP, SLD, and ATLAS are also included. A total of 48 parameters, including individual Wilson coefficients in the Warsaw basis and linear combinations of Wilson coefficients, are constrained simultaneously. Constraints on two-Higgs-doublet models and heavy-vector-boson models are also obtained by matching a relevant sub-set of the results with their parameters. This combined fit provides the most comprehensive effective field theory interpretation of experimental data by the ATLAS Collaboration to date. No significant deviations from the Standard Model are observed.

Axion dark matter induces electromagnetic radiation in conductors through nearly perpetual oscillations of electrons, driven by axion-electron interactions through the so-called chiral magnetic effect. It therefore provides a complementary probe of the axion-electron coupling $g_{ae}$ beyond the conventional axion-photon coupling $g_{a \gamma}$ in cavities. We show that existing axion cavity experiments can constrain the coupling to $g_{ae}\lesssim 10^{-5}$ over the scanned axion mass ranges, $1\,\mu\, {\rm eV}\lesssim m_a\lesssim 20\,\mu\,{\rm eV}$. Although we find that the radiation due to $g_{ae}$ at the copper cavity surface of electric conductivity $\sigma$ is suppressed by $m_a^2/\sigma^2\sim 10^{-20}$, compared to the radiation inside the cavity by the axion-photon conversion due to $g_{a\gamma}$, a sensitivity of about $10^{-9}$ could be achieved for $g_{ae}$ over a wider range of $m_a$, including values higher than those previously probed, if copper walls are replaced with carbon-based conductors.

In many new physics models with extended gauge symmetry, the new gauge boson $Z'$ could mediate the interactions between the dark matter and standard model particles. For the conventional $Z^\prime$ portal dark matter, the collider and the direct detection constraints typically pose a significant challenge. To address this pressing issue, we present in this paper a new benchmark model based on the gauged $U(1)_{B-L}$ symmetry, which introduces a Dirac dark fermion $\tilde{\chi}_1$ and a heavier partner $\tilde{\chi}_2$ with zero and nonzero $U(1)_{B-L}$ charge, respectively. Including the mass term $\delta m \bar{\tilde{\chi}}_1\tilde{\chi}_2$ results in the dark fermions $\chi_1$ and $\chi_2$ in the mass eigenstate, where the lighter one $\chi_1$ is regarded as the dark matter candidate. Various intriguing processes for the relic density arise with the compressed mass spectrum $m_{\chi_1}\simeq m_{\chi_2}$, such as the coscattering $\chi_2f\to\chi_1f$, the conversion $\chi_2\chi_i\to\chi_1\chi_j$, and the coannihilation $\chi_1\chi_2\to f\bar{f}$ processes. Suppressed by the small mixing angle $\theta$ between the dark fermions, the small effective gauge coupling of dark matter $\chi_1$ to the gauge boson $Z'$ is one distinct feature of this model, rendering phenomenology in many aspects more promising. In this paper, we investigate the production of dark matter through new mechanisms within the frameworks of resonance and secluded scenarios. The impacts of phenomenological constraints from collider, dark matter, and cosmology are also taken into account. We report that the conversion mechanism is both favored by the resonance and secluded scenarios under current constraints.

Directly probing light-quark Yukawa couplings and their flavor structure remains a major challenge due to their smallness and overwhelming QCD backgrounds. In this Letter, we propose a theoretical framework to access these couplings at lepton colliders through transverse spin dependent azimuthal modulations in dihadron fragmentation. These modulations arise from the interference between Higgs mediated and standard model amplitudes in $e^-e^+\to q\bar{q}Z$, producing angular structures that are linearly sensitive to the Yukawa couplings $y_q$, in contrast to conventional observables that scale as $y_q^2$. By combining channels with an identified accompanying single hadron, $h^\prime=\pi^\pm,K^\pm$, and $p/\bar{p}$, this approach cleanly disentangles the up- and down-quark Yukawa contributions, yielding typical limits at the $\mathcal{O}(10^{-4}\sim 10^{-3})$ level and establishing fragmentation dynamics as a novel and complementary probe of the Higgs flavor structure.

We study the sensitivity of the upcoming electron-ion (EIC) collider to purely electrophilic new physics in the GeV mass range. Within an effective field theory framework, we consider two different scenarios: an axion-like particle (ALP) and a new heavy neutral vector gauge boson $Z^\prime $, each couples to electrons only. We analyze electron-proton collisions at $\sqrt{s}= 141$ GeV with an integrated luminosity of $100~{\rm fb}^{-1}$, focusing primarily on the tri-electron final state. Additionally, loop-induced ALP-photon couplings driven photon final states are also explored. Incorporating realistic detector effects and systematic uncertainties, we obtain projected exclusion limits on the relevant cross-sections and couplings. We find that the results from EIC can significantly extend the sensitivity to electrophilic axion-like particles and $Z^\prime $ bosons in regions of parameter space that remain weakly constrained by existing experiments.

We consider the hypothetical possibility of neutral gauge bosons ($Z^\prime$) with flavor-specific leptophilic couplings. For such New Physics (NP) interactions, the current experimental constraints are much relaxed in the heavy mass regime, particularly for masses $\geq \mathcal{O}(1)$ TeV. However, in the presence of a leptophilic $Z^\prime$, leptonic decay modes of the electroweak gauge bosons and Higgs can be corrected at the loop level. Using the existing upper bounds on the corresponding decay widths, we find that one can impose stronger exclusion limits on the interactions of a heavy $Z^\prime$. Future updates on the aforesaid decay channels can be used in complementarity with the proposed lepton colliders to probe even weaker leptophilic NP interactions at the TeV scale and beyond.

The present research applies Graph Neural-Networks (GNNs) for energy measurement and particle identification tasks for a proposed second detector at the future Electron Ion Collider (EIC). In particular, an iron-scintillator sampling calorimeter would provide neutral hadron ($K_L$ and neutron) energy measurements and identification, as well as separation of muons from hadrons. Using detector simulations, particle hits in the detector are represented as graphs, and a GNN is trained for either classification or prediction. Furthermore, we developed a parameterization of the scintillator optical photon simulation that yields a 20-fold speed up compared to the default simulation. We find that the GNN method outperforms classical methods at the same tasks, and we report projections for the energy and timing resolution, and identification accuracy of the calorimeter. We also present an integration of the GNN method into a Multi-Objective Optimization framework, enabled by an automated pipeline of data generation, GNN training, and detector performance evaluation. We utilize the optimization to quantify the tradeoffs between different performance metrics at high and low energies when changing the detector design parameters, such as the iron/scintillator thickness.

In this work, we investigate the use of a quantum circuit as a binary classification model in the context of quantum machine learning. We call this model, binary quantum classifier. First, we describe fundamental concepts of quantum computing and introduce the computational tool used: Qibo, an open-source framework for efficient quantum simulations and quantum hardware control. Then, we describe how to design a binary quantum classifier for the classification of images and small arrays of variables by showing how to input data in the circuit, defining a quantum circuit model Ansatz with trainable parameters and a loss function, and implementing multiple minimizers. We test our quantum classifier with two data sets. The first one is the MNIST data set which is composed of handwritten digits (reduced to only handwritten zeros and handwritten ones for binary classification). We study the behavior of different minimizers by increasing the number of layers of the Ansatz. The second data set represents two different high energy collisions that can occur at colliders such as LHC (CERN). Due to in-time proton-proton interactions known as pile-up, we distinguish two different data sets: "without pile-up" and "with pile-up". These collisions can be represented by images of size 32x32 or by six high-level variables that we call features. By increasing the size of the training data set and the number of layers of the Ansatz, we search for the best minimizer. Splitting the data set in training set and test set, we compute: ROC curve, AUC score, confusion matrices and test set accuracy. For "with pile-up" images, we compare the results obtained with the quantum classifier with a small convolutional neural network. We conclude that is possible to build a binary quantum classifier with a quantum circuit and we highlight its performances and limitations in comparison with classical technologies.

We reassess prospects for direct detection of solar chameleons, in light of recent progress in modeling their production, and the availability of new XENONnT data. We show that the contribution from Primakoff production in the electric fields of electrons and ions dominates the electron recoil event rate, which is enhanced compared to earlier estimates based on magnetic conversion in the tachocline alone. We argue that the signal is governed by the effective coupling $β_{\text{eff}} \equiv β_γM_e^{-4}$, which encodes the combined effects of production and detection, where $β_γ$ and $M_e$ are the chameleon-photon (conformal) coupling and chameleon-electron disformal coupling scale, respectively. Setting the height of the chameleon potential to the dark energy (DE) scale $Λ\simeq 2.4\,{\text{meV}}$, we show that XENONnT electron recoil data set the upper limit $\log_{10}β_{\text{eff}}<-6.9$. This limit is independent of the conformal matter coupling $β_m$ and index $n$, and applies to the whole class of inverse power-law chameleons, well beyond the $n=1$ case usually studied. We comment on how future multi-target experiments and lower-threshold analyses could distinguish solar chameleons from other light (pseudo)scalar particles such as axions. Our work demonstrates that existing dark matter direct detection experiments can probe regions of parameter space relevant to screened DE models, providing complementary tests to astrophysical and fifth-force searches at no additional experimental cost.

Modern measurements in flavour physics rely on accurate simulations of signal and background processes, provided by a wide range of general-purpose and specialised Monte-Carlo event generators. Due to the inclusion of a larger amount of specialised decays of heavy hadrons, EvtGen is often the tool of choice for many scenarios. We investigate the phase-space sampling algorithm of EvtGen and demonstrate that it generates unphysical features in kinematic distributions of semileptonic $B$ decays involving resonances, originating from neglected phase-space factors. We provide a short-term solution to correct the affected simulated samples through reweighting of the hadronic invariant mass distribution.

A search for cosmological axions has been performed by scanning a frequency region of $38\,$MHz centered at about $10.2\,$GHz, corresponding to an axion mass $m_a \simeq 42\,μ$eV. The QUAX experimental apparatus, a haloscope comprised of a 1-liter volume tunable cavity immersed in an $8\,$T magnetic field and a quantum-limited detection chain, set limits on the axion-photon coupling at the $10^{-14}\,$GeV$^{-1}$ level. As no signal candidate has been observed, viable hadronic axion models are ruled out in a currently preferred post-inflationary region $m_a > 40\,μ$eV.

In the search for axionic Dark Matter, the high frequency part of the QCD axion parameter space is favored, as indicated by both cosmological and astrophysical arguments and recent indications from lattice QCD calculations. To extend the probing range of cavity haloscopes, solutions addressing the unfavorable scaling of cavity volume with frequency must be developed. Here, we present a novel type of high-volume thin shell resonator for high frequency haloscope dark matter searches. The cavity is formed by two nested and coaxial right angle polygonal prisms enclosed within two flat endcaps. For the axion-sensitive (pseudo-)TM010 mode, finite element simulations yield form factor of the order of 0.8 and Q factor of the order of 60000 for a copper cavity at 4$\,$K. High tunability of up to $\sim 5\%$ is achieved by reciprocal rotation of the two prisms, without significant changes in haloscope sensitivity. A prototype aluminium hexagonal cavity was built and tested, confirming the main characteristics of the design.

A traveling wave parametric amplifier has been integrated in the haloscope of the QUAX experiment. A search for dark matter axions has been performed with a high Q dielectric cavity immersed in a 8 T magnetic field and read by a detection chain having a system noise temperature of about 2.1 K at the frequency of 10.353 GHz. Scanning has been conducted by varying the cavity frequency using sapphire rods immersed into the cavity. At multiple operating frequencies, the sensitivity of the instrument was at the level of viable axion models.