Table of contents

In the present work we estimate the potential background of solar neutrinos on electron detectors. These detectors are considered relevant for detecting light dark matter particles in the MeV region, currently sought by experiments. We find that the copious low energy pp neutrinos are a dangerous background at the energies involved in these experiments, in fact close to the anticipated event rate, while the more energetic Boron neutrinos are harmless.

We use effective field theory to study the $\alpha$–$\alpha$ resonant scattering in a finite-temperature QED plasma. The static plasma screening effect causes the resonance state ⁸Be to live longer and eventually leads to the formation of a bound state when ${m}_{{\rm{D}}}\gtrsim 0.3\;{\rm{MeV}}$. We speculate that this effect may have implications on the rates of cosmologically and astrophysically relevant nuclear reactions involving $\alpha$ particles.

Quantum chromodynamics (QCDs) is the strongly interacting part of the Standard Model. It is supposed to describe all of nuclear physics; and yet, almost 50 years after the discovery of gluons and quarks, we are only just beginning to understand how QCD builds the basic bricks for nuclei: neutrons and protons, and the pions that bind them together. QCD is characterised by two emergent phenomena: confinement and dynamical chiral symmetry breaking (DCSB). They have far-reaching consequences, expressed with great force in the character of the pion; and pion properties, in turn, suggest that confinement and DCSB are intimately connected. Indeed, since the pion is both a Nambu–Goldstone boson and a quark–antiquark bound-state, it holds a unique position in nature and, consequently, developing an understanding of its properties is critical to revealing some very basic features of the Standard Model. We describe experimental progress toward meeting this challenge that has been made using electromagnetic probes, highlighting both dramatic improvements in the precision of charged-pion form factor data that have been achieved in the past decade and new results on the neutral-pion transition form factor, both of which challenge existing notions of pion structure. We also provide a theoretical context for these empirical advances, which begins with an explanation of how DCSB works to guarantee that the pion is un-naturally light; but also, nevertheless, ensures that the pion is the best object to study in order to reveal the mechanisms that generate nearly all the mass of hadrons. In canvassing advances in these areas, our discussion unifies many aspects of pion structure and interactions, connecting the charged-pion elastic form factor, the neutral-pion transition form factor and the pion's leading-twist parton distribution amplitude. It also sketches novel ways in which experimental and theoretical studies of the charged-kaon electromagnetic form factor can provide significant contributions. Importantly, it appears that recent predictions for the large-Q² behaviour of the charged-pion form factor can be tested by experiments planned at the upgraded 12 GeV Jefferson Laboratory. Those experiments will extend precise charged-pion form factor data up to momentum transfers that it now appears may be large enough to serve in validating factorisation theorems in QCD. If so, they may expose the transition between the non-perturbative and perturbative domains and thereby reach a goal that has driven hadro-particle physics for around 35 years.

The experimental and theoretical evidence for octupole collectivity in nuclei is reviewed. Recent theoretical advances, covering a wide spectrum from mean-field theory to algebraic and cluster approaches, are discussed. The status of experimental data on the behaviour of energy levels and electric dipole and electric octupole transition moments is reviewed. Finally, an outlook is given on future prospects for this field.

We present procedures based on Bayesian statistics for estimating, from data, the parameters of effective field theories (EFTs). The extraction of low-energy constants (LECs) is guided by theoretical expectations in a quantifiable way through the specification of Bayesian priors. A prior for natural-sized LECs reduces the possibility of overfitting, and leads to a consistent accounting of different sources of uncertainty. A set of diagnostic tools is developed that analyzes the fit and ensures that the priors do not bias the EFT parameter estimation. The procedures are illustrated using representative model problems, including the extraction of LECs for the nucleon-mass expansion in SU(2) chiral perturbation theory from synthetic lattice data.

We study the Higgs-boson decay width ${\rm{\Gamma }}(H\to {gg})$ up to ${\alpha }_{s}^{5}$ order under the minimal momentum space subtraction (mMOM) scheme. A major uncertainty of a finite-order perturbative quantum chromodymaics (pQCD) prediction is the perceived ambiguity in setting the renormalization scale. In the present paper, to achieve a precise pQCD prediction without renormalization scale uncertainty, we adopt the principle of maximum conformality (PMC) to set the renormalization scale of the process. The PMC has a solid theoretical foundation, which is based on renormalization group invariance and utilizes the renormalization group equation to fix the renormalization scale of the process. The key point of the application of the PMC is how to correctly set the {β_i} terms of the process to achieve the correct α_s-running behavior at each perturbative order. It is found that the ambiguities in dealing with the {β_i} terms of the decay width ${\rm{\Gamma }}(H\to {gg})$ under the $\bar{{\rm{MS}}}$ scheme can be avoided by using the physical mMOM scheme. For this purpose, for the first time we provide the PMC scale-setting formulas within the mMOM scheme up to a four-loop level. By using the PMC, it is found that a more reliable pQCD prediction on ${\rm{\Gamma }}(H\to {gg})$ can indeed be achieved under the mMOM scheme. As a byproduct, the convergence of the resultant pQCD series has been greatly improved due to the elimination of renormalon terms. By taking the newly measured Higgs mass, M_H = 125.09 ± 0.21 ± 0.11 GeV, our PMC prediction of the decay width is, ${\rm{\Gamma }}(H\to {gg}){| }_{{\rm{mMOM,}}{\rm{PMC}}}=339.3\pm {1.7}_{-2.4}^{+3.7}$ keV, in which the first error is from the Higgs mass uncertainty and the second error is the residual renormalization scale dependence by varying the initial renormalization scale ${\mu }_{r}\in [{M}_{H}/2,4{M}_{H}]$.

While the optimum-orientation concept is frequently used in studies on cluster decays involving deformed nuclei, the orientation-averaging concept is used in most alpha decay studies. We investigate the different decay stages in both the optimum-orientation and the orientation-averaging pictures of the cluster decay process. For decays of ^232,233,234U and ^236,238Pu isotopes, the quantum knocking frequency and penetration probability based on the Wentzel–Kramers–Brillouin approximation are used to find the decay width. The obtained decay width and the experimental half-life are employed to estimate the clusters preformation probability. We found that the orientation-averaged decay width is one or two orders of magnitude less than its value along the non-compact optimum orientation. Correspondingly, the extracted preformation probability based on the averaged decay width increases with the same orders of magnitude compared to its value obtained considering the optimum orientation. The cluster preformation probabilities estimated by the two considered schemes are in more or less comparable agreement with the Blendowske–Walliser (BW) formula based on the preformation probability of α (${S}_{\alpha }^{{\rm{a}}{\rm{v}}{\rm{e}}})$ obtained from the orientation-averaging scheme. All the results, including the optimum-orientation ones, deviate substantially from the BW law based on ${S}_{\alpha }^{{\rm{o}}{\rm{p}}{\rm{t}}}$ that was estimated from the optimum-orientation scheme. To account for the nuclear deformations, it is more relevant to calculate the decay width by averaging over the different possible orientations of the participating deformed nuclei, rather than considering the corresponding non-compact optimum orientation.

Data analysis of the next-generation effective antineutrino mass measurement experiment KATRIN requires reliable knowledge of systematic corrections. In particular, the width of the daughter molecular ion excitation spectrum rovibrational band should be known with better than 1% precision. Very precise ab initio quantum calculations exist, and we compare them with the well-known tritium molecule parameters within the framework of a phenomenological model. The rovibrational band width with accuracy of a few percent is interpreted as a result of the zero-point atomic oscillation in the harmonic potential. The Morse interatomic potential is used to investigate the impact of anharmonic atomic oscillations. The calculated corrections cannot account for the difference between the ab initio quantum calculations and the phenomenological model.