Nima Arkani-Hamed, Raffaele Tito D'Agnolo, Matthew Low, David Pinner

Precision gauge coupling unification is one of the primary quantitative successes of low energy or split supersymmetry. Preserving this success puts severe restrictions on possible matter and gauge sectors that might appear at collider-accessible energies. In this work we enumerate new gauge sectors which are compatible with unification, consisting of horizontal gauge groups acting on vector-like matter charged under the Standard Model. Interestingly, almost all of these theories are in the supersymmetric conformal window at high energies and confine quickly after the superpartners are decoupled. For a range of scalar masses compatible with both moderately tuned and minimally split supersymmetry, the confining dynamics happen at the multi-TeV scale, leading to a spectrum of multiple spin-0 and spin-1 resonances accessible to the LHC, with unusual quantum numbers and striking decay patterns.

Marcio O'Dwyer, Craig J. Copi, Lloyd Knox, Glenn D. Starkman

Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) full-sky temperature data show a hemispherical asymmetry in power nearly aligned with the Ecliptic. In real space, this anomaly can be quantified by the temperature variance in the northern and southern Ecliptic hemispheres. In this context, the northern hemisphere displays an anomalously low variance while the southern hemisphere appears unremarkable (consistent with expectations from the best-fitting theory, $\Lambda$CDM). While this is a well established result in temperature, the low signal-to-noise ratio in current polarization data prevents a similar comparison. This will change with a proposed ground-based CMB experiment, CMB-S4. With that in mind, we generate realizations of polarization maps constrained by the temperature data and predict the distribution of the hemispherical variance in polarization considering two different sky coverage scenarios possible in CMB-S4: full Ecliptic north coverage and just the portion of the North that can be observed from a ground based telescope at the high Chilean Atacama plateau. We find that even in the set of realizations constrained by the temperature data, the low northern hemisphere variance observed in temperature is not expected in polarization. Therefore, an anomalously low variance detection in polarization would provide strong evidence against the hypothesis that the temperature anomaly is simply a statistical fluke. We show, within $\Lambda$CDM, how variance measurements in both sky coverage scenarios are related. We find that the variance makes for a good statistic in cases where the sky coverage is limited, however a full northern coverage is still preferable.

Daniele Bertolini, Mikhail P. Solon

We apply an orthogonalization procedure on the effective field theory of large scale structure (EFT of LSS) shapes, relevant for the angle-averaged bispectrum and non-Gaussian covariance of the matter power spectrum at one loop. Assuming natural-sized EFT parameters, this identifies a linear combination of EFT shapes - referred to as the principal shape - that gives the dominant contribution for the whole kinematic plane, with subdominant combinations suppressed by a few orders of magnitude. For the covariance, our orthogonal transformation is in excellent agreement with a principal component analysis applied to available data. Additionally we find that, for both observables, the coefficients of the principal shapes are well approximated by the EFT coefficients appearing in the squeezed limit, and are thus measurable from power spectrum response functions. Employing data from N-body simulations for the growth-only response, we measure the single EFT coefficient describing the angle-averaged bispectrum with $\mathcal{O}(10\%)$ precision. These methods of shape orthogonalization and measurement of coefficients from response functions are valuable tools for developing the EFT of LSS framework, and can be applied to more general observables.

Kazunori Kohri, Yoshihiko Oyama, Toyokazu Sekiguchi, Tomo Takahashi

We investigate how precisely we can determine the nature of dark energy such as the equation of state (EoS) and its time dependence by using future observations of 21 cm fluctuations such as Square Kilometre Array (SKA) and Omniscope in combination with those from cosmic microwave background, baryon acoustic oscillation, type Ia supernovae and direct measurement of the Hubble constant. We consider several parametrizations for the EoS and find that future 21 cm observations will be powerful in constraining models of dark energy, especially when its EoS varies at high redshifts.

Yonit Hochberg, Tongyan Lin, Kathryn M. Zurek

Semiconductors are by now well-established targets for direct detection of MeV to GeV dark matter via scattering off electrons. We show that semiconductor targets can also detect significantly lighter dark matter via an absorption process. When the dark matter mass is above the band gap of the semiconductor (around an eV), absorption proceeds by excitation of an electron into the conduction band. Below the band gap, multi-phonon excitations enable absorption of dark matter in the 0.01 eV to eV mass range. Energetic dark matter particles emitted from the sun can also be probed for masses below an eV. We show that the reach for absorption of a relic kinetically mixed dark photon or pseudoscalar in semiconductors such as germanium or silicon can exceed current astrophysical and terrestrial constraints, with only a moderate exposure.

Dario Bettoni, Jose María Ezquiaga, Kurt Hinterbichler, Miguel Zumalacárregui, (2) Madrid IFT, (3) Perimeter Institute, (4) UC Berkeley)

We investigate the propagation speed of gravitational waves (GWs) in generic scalar-tensor gravity. A difference in the speed of gravity relative to the speed of light can be caused by the emergence of a disformal geometry in the gravitational sector. This requires the background scalar configuration to both spontaneously break Lorentz symmetry and couple to second derivatives of the metric perturbations through the Weyl tensor or higher derivatives of the scalar. The latter requirement allows a division of gravitational theories into two families: those that predict that GWs propagate exactly at the speed of light and those that allow for anomalous speed. Neutron star binary mergers and other GW events with an associated electromagnetic counterpart can place extremely tight constraints on the speed of GWs relative to the speed of light. However, such observations become impossible if the speed is modified too much, as predicted by some models of cosmic acceleration. Complementary measurements of the speed of gravity may be possible by monitoring nearby periodic sources, such as the binary white dwarf system WDS J0651+2844 and other eLISA verification binaries, and looking for a phase difference between the gravitational wave signal and an electromagnetic signal. Future multi-messenger GW astronomy thus has the potential to detect an anomalous speed, thereby ruling out GR and significantly changing our understanding of gravity. A negative detection will rule out or severely constrain any solution in any theory which allows for anomalous propagation of GWs.

Yi Chen, Joe Lykken, Maria Spiropulu, Daniel Stolarski, Roberto Vega-Morales

The ratio of the Higgs couplings to $WW$ and $ZZ$ pairs, $\lambda_{WZ}$, is a fundamental parameter in electroweak symmetry breaking as well as a measure of the (approximate) custodial symmetry possessed by the gauge boson mass matrix. We show that Higgs decays to four leptons are sensitive, via tree level/1-loop interference effects, to both the magnitude and, in particular, overall sign of $\lambda_{WZ}$. Determining this sign requires interference effects, as it is nearly impossible to measure with rate information. Furthermore, simply determining the sign effectively establishes the custodial representation of the Higgs boson. We find that $h\to4\ell$ ($4\ell \equiv 2e2\mu, 4e, 4\mu$) decays have excellent prospects of directly establishing the overall sign at a high luminosity 13 TeV LHC. We also examine the ultimate LHC sensitivity in $h\to4\ell$ to the magnitude of $\lambda_{WZ}$. Our results are independent of other measurements of the Higgs boson couplings and, in particular, largely free of assumptions about the top quark Yukawa couplings which also enter at 1-loop. This makes $h\to4\ell$ a unique and independent probe of the electroweak symmetry breaking mechanism and custodial symmetry.