Patrick C. Breysse, Ely D. Kovetz, Peter S. Behroozi, Liang Dai, Marc Kamionkowski

In the next few years, intensity-mapping surveys that target lines such as CO, Ly$\alpha$, and CII stand to provide powerful probes of high-redshift astrophysics. However, these line emissions are highly non-Gaussian, and so the typical power-spectrum methods used to study these maps will leave out a significant amount of information. We propose a new statistic, the probability distribution of voxel intensities, which can access this extra information. Using a model of a CO intensity map at $z\sim3$ as an example, we demonstrate that this voxel intensity distribution (VID) provides substantial constraining power beyond what is obtainable from the power spectrum alone. We find that a future survey similar to the planned COMAP Full experiment could constrain the CO luminosity function to order $\sim10\%$. We also explore the effects of contamination from continuum emission, interloper lines, and gravitational lensing on our constraints and find that the VID statistic retains significant constraining power even in pessimistic scenarios.

Christian Autermann

The ATLAS and CMS experiments at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN have searched for signals of new physics, in particular for supersymmetry. The data collected until 2012 at center-of-mass energies of 7 and 8 TeV and integrated luminosities of 5 fb^-1 and 20 fb^-1, respectively, agree with the expectation from standard model processes. Constraints on supersymmetry have been calculated and interpreted in different models. Limits on supersymmetry particle masses at the TeV scale have been derived and interpreted generally in the context of simplified model spectra. The constrained minimal supersymmetric standard model is disfavored by the experimental results. Natural supersymmetry scenarios with low supersymmetry particle masses remain possible in multiple regions, for example in those with compressed spectra, that are difficult to access experimentally. The upgraded LHC operating at 13 TeV is gaining sensitivity to the remaining unexplored SUSY parameter space.

Garrett Goon, Kurt Hinterbichler

Under the assumption that a UV theory does not display superluminal behavior, we ask what constraints on superluminality are satisfied in the effective field theory (EFT). We study two examples of effective theories: quantum electrodynamics (QED) coupled to gravity after the electron is integrated out, and the flat-space galileon. The first is realized in nature, the second is more speculative, but they both exhibit apparent superluminality around non-trivial backgrounds. In the QED case, we attempt, and fail, to find backgrounds for which the superluminal signal advance can be made larger than the putative resolving power of the EFT. In contrast, in the galileon case it is easy to find such backgrounds, indicating that if the UV completion of the galileon is (sub)luminal, quantum corrections must become important at distance scales of order the Vainshtein radius of the background configuration, much larger than the naive EFT strong coupling distance scale. Such corrections would be reminiscent of the non-perturbative Schwarzschild scale quantum effects that are expected to resolve the black hole information problem. Finally, a byproduct of our analysis is a calculation of how perturbative quantum effects alter charged Reissner-Nordstrom black holes.

Kerstin Perez, Kenny C. Y. Ng, John F. Beacom, Cora Hersh, Shunsaku Horiuchi, Roman Krivonos

We use NuSTAR observations of the Galactic Center to search for X-ray lines from the radiative decays of sterile neutrino dark matter. Finding no evidence of unknown lines, we set limits on the sterile neutrino mass and mixing angle. In most of the mass range 10-50 keV, these are now the strongest limits, at some masses improving upon previous limits by a factor of ~10. When combined with constraints on the primordial lepton asymmetry and structure formation, the allowed mass range of the the $\nu$MSM framework is reduced by more than half. Future NuSTAR observations may be able to cover much of the remaining parameter space.

oxg34

https://dcc.ligo.org/public/0123/P1500271/014/GW150914_neutrino.pdf

M. G. Aartsen, K. Abraham, M. Ackermann, J. Adams, J. A. Aguilar, M. Ahlers, M. Ahrens, D. Altmann, K. Andeen, T. Anderson, I. Ansseau, G. Anton, M. Archinger, C. Argüelles, J. Auffenberg, S. Axani, X. Bai, S. W. Barwick, V. Baum, R. Bay, J. J. Beatty, J. Becker Tjus, K.-H. Becker, S. BenZvi, D. Berley, E. Bernardini, A. Bernhard, D. Z. Besson, G. Binder, D. Bindig, M. Bissok, E. Blaufuss, S. Blot, C. Bohm, M. Börner, F. Bos, D. Bose, S. Böser, O. Botner, J. Braun, L. Brayeur, H.-P. Bretz, S. Bron, A. Burgman, T. Carver, M. Casier, E. Cheung, D. Chirkin, A. Christov, K. Clark, L. Classen, S. Coenders, G. H. Collin, J. M. Conrad, D. F. Cowen, R. Cross, M. Day, J. P. A. M. de André, C. De Clercq, E. del Pino Rosendo, H. Dembinski, S. De Ridder, P. Desiati, et al. (251 additional authors not shown)

We present the results of the first IceCube search for dark matter annihilation in the center of the Earth. Weakly Interacting Massive Particles (WIMPs), candidates for dark matter, can scatter off nuclei inside the Earth and fall below its escape velocity. Over time the captured WIMPs will be accumulated and may eventually self-annihilate. Among the annihilation products only neutrinos can escape from the center of the Earth. Large-scale neutrino telescopes, such as the cubic kilometer IceCube Neutrino Observatory located at the South Pole, can be used to search for such neutrino fluxes. Data from 327 days of detector livetime during 2011/ 2012 were analyzed. No excess beyond the expected background from atmospheric neutrinos was detected. The derived upper limits on the annihilation rate of WIMPs in the Earth and the resulting muon flux are an order of magnitude stronger than the limits of the last analysis performed with data from IceCube's predecessor AMANDA. The limits can be translated in terms of a spin-independent WIMP-nucleon cross section. For a WIMP mass of 50 GeV this analysis results in the most restrictive limits achieved with IceCube data.

Anne M. Green

The recent discovery of gravitational waves from mergers of $\sim 10 \, M_{\odot}$ black hole binaries has stimulated interested in Primordial Black Hole dark matter in this mass range. Microlensing and dynamical constraints exclude all of the dark matter being in compact objects with a delta function mass function in the range $10^{-7} \lesssim M/ M_{\odot} \lesssim 10^{5}$. However it has been argued that all of the dark matter could be composed of compact objects in this range with an extended mass function. We explicitly recalculate the microlensing and dynamical constraints for compact objects with an extended mass function which replicates the PBH mass function produced by inflation models. We find that the microlensing and dynamical constraints place conflicting constraints on the width of the mass function, and do not find a mass function which satisfies both constraints.