# Theoretical Physics Quarterly Progress Reports

Investigating the field of high energy physics through experiments that strengthen our fundamental understanding of matter, energy, space, and time.

# Los Alamos HEP Theory Quarterly Report FY2018-Q1

Daniele Alves, Tanmoy Bhattacharya, Michael L. Graesser, Rajan Gupta, Michael S. Warren

The primary areas of activity of the theory group are in physics beyond the Standard Model, cosmology, dark matter, lattice quantum chromodynamics, neutrinos, the fundamentals of quantum field theory and gravity, and particle astrophysics. The questions pursued by this group relate to deep mysteries in our understanding of Nature at the level of the the Standard Model and beyond. The main tools we use are quantum field theory and General Relativity.

## Lattice QCD

The Los Alamos Lattice QCD team and their collaborators are carrying out precision studies investigating signatures of new physics at the TeV scale, Novel CP violating operator's contribution to nEDM, elucidating the structure of the nucleon, and understanding QCD at finite temperature. Progress during this quarter on these projects is described below.

### Nucleon charges and form-factors

Extensive additional simulations of isovector and flavor-diagonal charges gA, gS and gT from the 2+1+1-flavor clover-on-HISQ calculations were completed, including the analysis of the very time consuming second physical mass HISQ ensemble with lattice size ${96}^{3}×192$ at 0.06 fm on cluster and GPU computers at Los Alamos and using ERCAP allocations at NERSC. The final analysis of nucleon charges, electric, magnetic and axial vector form factors using up to 3-state fits for both the 2+1+1-flavor clover-on-HISQ and 2+1-flavor clover on clover lattice QCD formulations is ongoing and five manuscripts describing the results are being prepared. Preliminary results were presented by Rajan Gupta and Yong-Chull Jang at Lattice 2017, and the write ups accepted for publication as part of the conference proceedings. Our first results for the axial vector form factors from 2+1+1-flavor clover-on-HISQ have been published in PRD.

### Matrix elements of novel CP violating operators and nEDM

Calculations of the matrix elements of the quark chromo electric dipole moment operator and mixing with the pseudoscalar operator are ongoing. The formalism for these calculations and new numerical techniques are being developed. Status of results was presented at Lattice 2017 by Boram Yoon in a plenary talk titled "neutron electric moment on the lattice".

### Disconnected diagrams

The matrix elements of iso-scalar and flavor diagonal operators are needed for the analysis of a number of interesting qualities such as the nucleon electric dipole moment, the nucleon sigma term and the strangeness content of the proton, and the interaction of dark matter with nucleons. These matrix elements get contributions from disconnected diagrams, that are computationally challenging to compute with high precision. Bhattacharya, Gupta and Yoon are preparing a manuscript describing the results of extensive simulations carried out over the last three years for publication. In these calculations they analyze the chiral and continuum extrapolation for the flavor diagonal charges for the first time. They are also collaborating with Gambhir, Orginos and Stathopoulos at William and Mary to develop a new method based on deflation and hierarchical probing to speed up the calculation of disconnected diagrams.

Relevant References:
arXiv:1611.01193

### Transverse Momentum Distribution Functions

Results for the Sivers and Boer-Mulders shift, the transversity and the generalized worm-gear shift for two different fermion discretization schemes were finalized and published in PRD [arXiv:1706.03406].

### Behavior of QCD at finite temperature

Investigated the properties of QCD at finite temperature, including the nature of the transition, the equation of state and the fluctuations of conserved charges (electric charge, strangeness, baryon number) around the transition temperature (140–160 MeV) as part of the HOTQCD collaboration. The five publications have over 2100 citations.

## Dark Matter and LHC Physics

Graesser is revisiting the topological dark matter scenario and generalizing it in several directions. He is also continuing his work with Tuhin Roy (TATA) and Arun Thalapillil (Pune) on improving the sensitivity of the LHC to new TeV-scale physics scenarios.

## Neutrinoless double beta decay

Graesser, together with Cirigliano, Dekens and Mereghetti (LANL) and de Vries (Niken), has obtained a master formula for the neutrinoless double beta decay rate caused by the standard neutrino mass mechanism as well as dimension-9 lepton violating operators.

Graesser, Cirigliano, Dekens, de Vries, van Kolck, Mereghetti, and Pastore, are investigating the leading order ladder-diagram resummation (a la Kaplan, Savage and Wise (KSW)) of the standard neutrino mass contribution to the neutrinoless double beta decay amplitude, in the nn-> pp ee S10 channel, due to loops of pions and four-nucleon contact operators.

## MeV Axions and New Physics at the GeV Scale

Daniele S. M. Alves is working on follow-ups to her work on MeV axions and New Physics at the GeV scale (arXiv:1710.03764; submitted to JHEP). She is currently focused on exploring "hadron impostors", i.e., BSM states at the GeV scale that couple hadronically. These states might have evaded discovery due to large hadronic backgrounds, or might have been seen but were misinterpreted as hadronic resonances. She is also deriving new constraints on MeV axions.

Relevant References:
arXiv:1710.03764

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