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Search indexed NASA NTRS and DOE OSTI research on propulsion, heat transfer, battery materials and energy systems. Follow report and document links to the original sources.

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At least 469 records · Page 26
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DOE OSTI2024

Measuring Muon Antineutrino Charged-Current Interactions Without Mesons in the Final State, in the NOvA Near Detector

NOvA is a long-baseline neutrino experiment based at Fermilab in the US, with the primary aim of measuring neutrino and antineutrino oscillations. This will enhance our understanding of electroweak interactions by measuring the neutrino mixing angles, CP-violating phase and neutrino mass ordering. To measure these oscillations, we first need to have a deep understanding of how neutrinos and antineutrinos interact with matter. Antineutrino interaction cross sections are, at present, particularly poorly constrained, and processes such as meson exchange currents are not well understood in the antineutrino sector. This analysis will develop a cross-section measurement of muon antineutrino interactions without mesons (e.g. pions or kaons) in the final state, in the NOvA near detector. A high-statistics, high-purity sample is obtained through a cut-based selection process implementing machine learning techniques. The sample is dominated by quasi-elastic and meson exchange current interactions which are sensitive to nuclear effects such as Final-State Interactions. The cross section will be extracted as a function of the incoming neutrino energy and the kinematics of the outgoing particles.

72 PHYSICS OF ELEMENTARY PARTICLES AND FIELDS↗
DOE OSTI2024

Probing Naturalness with Searches for Supersymmetric Higgs Partners at the Large Hadron Collider

The discovery of the Higgs boson at the Large Hadron Collider completed the standard model of particle physics and led to the 2013 Nobel Prize. While it has been extremely successful in describing a wide variety of phenomena, the standard model cannot be the final theory of nature because it is unable to explain why the Higgs boson mass lies at the electroweak scale rather than 16 orders of magnitude larger at the Planck scale, a theoretical flaw known as the ``hierarchy problem.'' Supersymmetry is a standard model extension that could provide a natural solution to the hierarchy problem by introducing light supersymmetric Higgs partners. This proposal focused on searches that are sensitive to supersymmetric Higgs partners in data collected by the ATLAS experiment, which were carried out by the University of Illinois high-energy physics group led by PI Ben Hooberman as part of his Department of Energy Early Career Research Program award from 2017-2023. The searches were complemented by improvements to particle identification algorithms and the ATLAS trigger system that extend the sensitivity of future supersymmetry searches.

72 PHYSICS OF ELEMENTARY PARTICLES AND FIELDS↗
DOE OSTI2025

Searches for New Long-Lived Particles and Upgrade to the ATLAS Inner Detector (Final Technical Report)

The search for new fundamental particles is one of the defining goals of the Large Hadron Collider (LHC). The discovery of the Higgs Boson by the ATLAS and CMS collaborations provided the capstone of the Standard Model of particle physics, but outstanding questions remain. Why does the Higgs boson have a mass of 125 GeV when its natural mass would be many orders of magnitude larger? Is there a universal symmetry which unites all three forces described by the Standard Model? Can that symmetry be extended to include gravity? Is dark matter, evidenced by astronomical observations, made of a particle that interacts via Standard Model forces with the rest of matter? Together, these motivations provide compelling arguments that new physical processes await discovery. This project addressed some outstanding questions about the fundamental particles and their interactions with the ATLAS experiment at the Large Hadron Collider. In particular, the project improved the discovery potential for new, long- lived particles produced via electroweak processes in proton-proton collisions and set world-leading limits on their existence for certain values of their potential mass and lifetime. To achieve this, the project developed new data analysis methods, developed new triggers to select events with new long-lived particles during data-taking of the ATLAS experiment, and analyzed the largest proton–proton collision dataset ever produced. The project also supported significant development of the data acquisition software for the upgrade to the ATLAS inner detector, the Inner TracKer (ITk). The upgrade of the ATLAS inner detector is essential to the success of the entire Phase II physics program on ATLAS. Personnel supported by the project provided support for integration, assembly, and testing of the inner two layers of the ITk pixel system during its prototype and pre-production phase. Four PhD students and two post-doctoral scholars were supported by the grant and received invaluable scientific training as part of the research endeavor. The students and postdocs gained essential professional skills in the areas of advanced data analysis techniques, statistical analysis of data and simulation, programming in C++ and Python, hardware and instrumentation development, and presentation and collaboration skills. Additionally, approximately ten undergraduate students supported through other funding sources participated in research activities synergistic with the goals of this project, receiving essential mentorship from the personnel supported by this project.

72 PHYSICS OF ELEMENTARY PARTICLES AND FIELDS↗
DOE OSTI2023

New Jet Tagging Techniques in Vector Boson Scattering (VBS) WV Analysis in the Semi-Leptonic Channel with the CMS Experiment

The first evidence for the electroweak vector boson scattering in the lνqq¯ decay channel of two weak vector bosons WV (V=W, Z), produced in association with two parton jets, was reported in 2021 by the CMS experiment in proton-proton collisions at √s = 13 TeV, collected during 2016-2018, with an integrated luminosity of 138 f b −1 .

72 PHYSICS OF ELEMENTARY PARTICLES AND FIELDS↗
DOE OSTI2026

Deep Learning Methods for Symbolic Calculations in HEP

This project develops machine learning methods to accelerate symbolic calculations in high-energy physics. Using sequence-to-sequence transformer models, we construct frameworks to predict squared amplitudes and related quantities for Standard Model processes, including quantum electrodynamics, quantum chromodynamics, and electroweak interactions. The results demonstrate that deep learning can successfully learn complex symbolic relationships and provide a scalable approach to symbolic computation with potential applications in precision calculations and collider phenomenology.

72 PHYSICS OF ELEMENTARY PARTICLES AND FIELDS↗
DOE OSTI2024

Status and perspectives of cLFV at Mu2e

Flavor physics offers a promising way to explore fundamental aspects of the standard model, such asthe mass hierarchy and electroweak symmetry breaking. Within this field, Charged Lepton FlavorViolation (CLFV) stands out as a phenomenon that is strongly suppressed in the Standard Model,making it an excellent probe for potential new physics. Ongoing CLFV experiments, includingMu2e, COMET, MEG, and Mu3e, are preparing for data collection in the coming decade. Amongthe possible searches in the muon sector (𝜇 → 𝑒𝛾, mu3e and muon conversion), two muonconversion experiments will start taking data in few years: Mu2e at Fermilab and COMET atJPArk. Both of them aim to improve the current sensitivity by several orders of magnitude. Thisviolation of charged lepton flavor presents an opportunity to explore novel physics on a scale notcurrently accessible through direct searches at contemporary or planned high-energy colliders.

72 PHYSICS OF ELEMENTARY PARTICLES AND FIELDS↗
DOE OSTI2020

Weak Transitions in Light Nuclei

Nuclei are used for high-precision tests of the Standard Model and for studies of physics beyond the Standard Model. Without a thorough understanding of nuclei, we will not be able to meaningfully interpret the growing body of experimental data nor will we be able to disentangle new physics signals from underlying nuclear effects. This calls for accurate calculations of nuclear structure and reactions. In this work, we focus on electroweak decays in nuclei with mass number A ≤ 10 and report on ab initio Quantum Monte Carlo calculations of reduced matrix elements entering beta decays and electron captures in nuclei with mass number A ≤ 10. The many-body wave functions are calculated using selected Norfolk two- and three-nucleon potential models and associated one- and two-body axial currents at tree-level obtained from a chiral effective field theory with pions, nucleons, and Δ. The agreement with the experimental data is satisfactory except for transitions in A = 8 nuclei. In this specific case, the theory significantly underpredicts the experimental data, which indicates the need of further improvements in the corresponding nuclear wave functions. In this study, emphasis is placed on the contributions of two-body axial currents that are carefully analyzed using two-body transition densities. This allow us to study the spatial distribution and short-range behavior of two-body dynamics. In particular, the transition densities when scaled to peak at 1.0 exhibit universal short-range behavior across the considered nuclei, while they differ in the long-range tails.

73 NUCLEAR PHYSICS AND RADIATION PHYSICS↗
DOE OSTI2023

Future accelerator projects: new physics at the energy frontier

High-energy colliders provide direct access to the energy frontier, allowing to search for new physics at scales as high as the machine’s center-of-mass energy, perform precision measurements of the Standard Model (SM) parameters, including those related to the flavor sector, and determine the Higgs boson properties and their connection to electroweak symmetry breaking. Each proposed future collider option has its own specific science goals and capabilities, depending on the designed running energy (energies) amongst other parameters. In this paper, an overview of the discovery potential of future circular and linear colliders is presented. Results from searches for beyond the Standard Model (BSM) phenomena at proton–proton, proton–electron, electron–positron, and muon–antimuon colliders are summarized.

71 CLASSICAL AND QUANTUM MECHANICS, GENERAL PHYSIC↗
DOE OSTI2023

The St. Benedict Facility: Probing Fundamental Symmetries through Mixed Mirror $β$-Decays

Precise measurements of nuclear beta decays provide a unique insight into the Standard Model due to their connection to the electroweak interaction. These decays help constrain the unitarity or non-unitarity of the Cabibbo–Kobayashi–Maskawa (CKM) quark mixing matrix, and can uniquely probe the existence of exotic scalar or tensor currents. Of these decays, superallowed mixed mirror transitions have been the least well-studied, in part due to the absence of data on their Fermi to Gamow-Teller mixing ratios ($ρ$). At the Nuclear Science Laboratory (NSL) at the University of Notre Dame, the Superallowed Transition Beta-Neutrino Decay Ion Coincidence Trap (St. Benedict) is being constructed to determine the ρ for various mirror decays via a measurement of the beta–neutrino angular correlation parameter ($α_{βν}$) to a relative precision of 0.5%. In this work, we present an overview of the St. Benedict facility and the impact it will have on various Beyond the Standard Model studies, including an expanded sensitivity study of $ρ$ for various mirror nuclei accessible to the facility. A feasibility evaluation is also presented that indicates the measurement goals for many mirror nuclei, which are currently attainable in a week of radioactive beam delivery at the NSL.

73 NUCLEAR PHYSICS AND RADIATION PHYSICS↗
DOE OSTI2023

Prospects for Charged Higgs Bosons in Natural SUSY Models at the High-Luminosity LHC

We continue our examination of prospects for the discovery of heavy Higgs bosons of natural SUSY (natSUSY) models at the high luminosity LHC (HL-LHC), this time focusing on charged Higgs bosons. In natSUSY, higgsinos are expected at the few hundred GeV scale whilst electroweak gauginos inhabit the TeV scale and the heavy Higgs bosons, H, A and H± could range up tens of TeV without jeopardizing naturalness. For TeV-scale heavy SUSY Higgs bosons H, A and H±, as currently required by LHC searches, SUSY decays into gaugino plus higgsino can dominate H± decays provided these decays are kinematically accessible. The visible decay products of higgsinos are soft making them largely invisible, whilst the gauginos decay to W, Z or h plus missing transverse energy (ET). Charged Higgs bosons are dominantly produced at LHC14 via the parton subprocess, gb→H±t. In this paper, we examine the viability of observing signatures from H±→τν, H±→tb and H±→W,Z,h+ET events produced in association with a top quark at the HL-LHC over large Standard Model (SM) backgrounds from (mainly) tt¯, tt¯V and tt¯h production (where V=W,Z). We find that the greatest reach is found via the SM H±(→τν)+t channel with a subdominant contribution from the H±(→tb)+t channel. Unlike for neutral Higgs searches, the SUSY decay modes appear to be unimportant for H± searches at the HL-LHC. We delineate regions of the mA vs. tanβ plane, mostly around mA∼ 1–2 TeV, where signals from charged Higgs bosons would serve to confirm signals of a heavy, neutral Higgs boson at the 5σ level or, alternatively, to exclude heavy Higgs bosons at the 95% confidence level at the high luminosity LHC.

72 PHYSICS OF ELEMENTARY PARTICLES AND FIELDS↗
DOE OSTI2022

Current and Future γ-Ray Searches for Dark Matter Annihilation Beyond the Unitarity Limit

For decades, searches for electroweak-scale dark matter (DM) have been performed without a definitive detection. This lack of success may hint that DM searches have focused on the wrong mass range. A proposed candidate beyond the canonical parameter space is ultraheavy DM (UHDM). In this work, we consider indirect UHDM annihilation searches for masses between 30 TeV and 30 PeV—extending well beyond the unitarity limit at ~100 TeV—and discuss the basic requirements for DM models in this regime. We explore the feasibility of detecting the annihilation signature, and the expected reach for UHDM with current and future very-high-energy (VHE; >100 GeV) γ-ray observatories. Specifically, we focus on three reference instruments: two Imaging Atmospheric Cherenkov Telescope arrays, modeled on VERITAS and CTA-North, and one extended air shower array, motivated by HAWC. With reasonable assumptions on the instrument response functions and background rate, we find a set of UHDM parameters (mass and cross section) for which a γ-ray signature can be detected by the aforementioned observatories. Here, we further compute the expected upper limits for each experiment. With realistic exposure times, the three instruments can probe DM across a wide mass range. At the lower end, it can still have a point-like cross section, while at higher masses the DM could have a geometric cross section, indicative of compositeness.

72 PHYSICS OF ELEMENTARY PARTICLES AND FIELDS↗
DOE OSTI2024

Measurement of the Drell-Yan forward-backward asymmetry and of the effective leptonic weak mixing angle in proton-proton collisions at $\sqrt{s}$ = 13 TeV

The forward-backward asymmetry in Drell-Yan production and the effective leptonic electroweak mixing angle are measured in proton-proton collisions at $\sqrt{s}$ = 13 TeV, collected by the CMS experiment and corresponding to an integrated luminosity of 138 fb$^{-1}$. The measurement uses both dimuon and dielectron events, and is performed as a function of the dilepton mass and rapidity. The unfolded angular coefficient $A_4$ is also extracted, as a function of the dilepton mass and rapidity. Using the CT18Z set of parton distribution functions, we obtain $\sinθ^\ell_\text{eff}$ = 0.23152 $\pm$ 0.00031, where the uncertainty includes the experimental and theoretical contributions. The measured value agrees with the standard model fit result to global experimental data. This is the most precise $\sinθ^\ell_\text{eff}$ measurement at a hadron collider, with a precision comparable to the results obtained at LEP and SLD.

FOS: Physical sciences↗
DOE OSTI2025

Neutrino Scattering: Connections Across Theory and Experiment

In this document drafted by the Neutrino Scattering Theory Experiment Collaboration (NuSTEC), we provide input on the synergies between theoretical and experimental efforts that can provide critical input to the prediction accuracy needed for the forthcoming high-precision neutrino measurements. These efforts involve a wide range of energies and interaction processes, as well as target nuclei and interaction probes. The challenges discussed will be overcome only through the active support of integrated collaboration across strong and electroweak physics from both the nuclear and high energy physics communities.

72 PHYSICS OF ELEMENTARY PARTICLES AND FIELDS↗
DOE OSTI2025

Physics Prospects for a near-term Proton-Proton Collider

Hadron colliders at the energy frontier offer significant discovery potential through precise measurements of Standard Model processes and direct searches for new particles and interactions. A future hadron collider would enhance the exploration of particle physics at the electroweak scale and beyond, potentially uniting the community around a common project. The LHC has already demonstrated precision measurement and new physics search capabilities well beyond its original design goals and the HL-LHC will continue to usher in new advancements. This document highlights the physics potential of an FCC-hh machine to directly follow the HL-LHC. In order to reduce the timeline and costs, the physics impact of lower collider energies, down to $\sim 50$~TeV, is evaluated. Lower centre-of-mass energy could leverage advanced magnet technology to reduce both the cost and time to the next hadron collider. Such a machine offers a breadth of physics potential and would make key advancements in Higgs measurements, direct particle production searches, and high-energy tests of Standard Model processes. Most projected results from such a hadron-hadron collider are superior to or competitive with other proposed accelerator projects and this option offers unparalleled physics breadth. The FCC program should lay out a decision-making process that evaluates in detail options for proceeding directly to a hadron collider, including the possibility of reducing energy targets and staging the magnet installation to spread out the cost profile.

FOS: Physical sciences↗
DOE OSTI2025

Upper Bound on Parity Breaking Scale for Doublet WIMP Dark Matter

We consider weakly interacting massive particle (WIMP) dark matter in a Parity solution to the strong CP problem. The WIMP phenomenology can be drastically affected by the presence of Parity partners of the WIMP and electroweak gauge bosons. We focus on a Parity extension of $SU(2)_L$-doublet fermion dark matter, identify the viable parameter space, and derive the predictions of the theory. We find that the Parity symmetry breaking scale is bounded from above, with the bound given by $25-60$ TeV, depending on whether or not dark matter and its Parity partner coannihilate with each other. The High-Luminosity Large Hadron Collider, future colliders, and direct and indirect detection experiments can probe the parameter space further, with correlated signal rates.

Baldwin, Matthew J. [Chicago U.; Chicago U., KICP]↗
DOE OSTI2025

Aβ [Eβ] in 37K decay: new physics with opposite β helicity

By extending our analysis and simulations of our K -decay data set to allow the asymmetry with respect to nuclear spin to vary with energy , we have gained sensitivity to new physics that depends on a helicity factor for the , . In particular, we constrain Lorentz scalar and tensor quark-lepton interaction strengths at a sensitivity complementary to the similar Fierz interference term in neutron decay. Our result for that new physics is = 0.033 0.084 (stat) 0.039 (syst), consistent with the standard model electroweak interaction value . We consider presently achieved complementarity to -decay and particle physics experiments, along with projectable technical improvements to our method.

Behr, J. A.↗
DOE OSTI2026

Higgs Boson Spookiness: Probing Quantum Nonlocality with Spacetime-Resolved $H\rightarrowτ^+τ^-$ Decays

We demonstrate that a future precision $ee$ Higgs factory would be able to perform a spacetime-resolved test of quantum nonlocality in Higgs boson decays. In simulated $ee\rightarrow ZH \rightarrow (μμ)(ττ)$ events at $\sqrt{s}=240$ GeV, we reconstruct $τ$ lepton decay vertices and measure spin correlations as a function of the spacetime interval between the two $τ$ decays. Such a measurement would be able to test Bell-inequality-violating correlations for spacelike-separated decays, enabling direct exclusion of superluminal, finite-speed entanglement signaling theories. With 0.75 ab$^{-1}$ of integrated luminosity, entanglement signal propagation speeds below $\approx2c$ can be excluded at 95$\%$ CL. Signals establishing any spin correlation can be excluded for speeds below $\approx9c$. This constitutes the first proposed spacetime-resolved measurement of electroweak quantum entanglement at a particle collider and demonstrates a unique capability of future Higgs factories.

FOS: Physical sciences↗
DOE OSTI2023

Snowmass 2021 Whitepaper: Proton Structure at the Precision Frontier

An overwhelming number of theoretical predictions for hadron colliders require parton distribution functions (PDFs), which are an important ingredient of theory infrastructure for the next generation of high-energy experiments. This whitepaper summarizes the status and future prospects for determination of high-precision PDFs applicable in a wide range of energies and experiments, in particular in precision tests of the Standard Model and in new physics searches at the high-luminosity Large Hadron Collider and Electron–Ion Collider. We discuss the envisioned advancements in experimental measurements, QCD theory, global analysis methodology, and computing that are necessary to bring unpolarized PDFs in the nucleon to the N2LO and N3LO accuracy in the QCD coupling strength. Special attention is given to the new tasks that emerge in the era of the precision PDF analysis, such as those focusing on the robust control of systematic factors both in experimental measurements and theoretical computations. Various synergies between experimental and theoretical studies of the hadron structure are explored, including opportunities for studying PDFs for nuclear and meson targets, PDFs with electroweak contributions or dependence on the transverse momentum, for incisive comparisons between phenomenological models for the PDFs and computations on discrete lattice, and for cross-fertilization with machine learning/AI approaches.

72 PHYSICS OF ELEMENTARY PARTICLES AND FIELDS↗