Q-Ball Superradiance.

Q-balls are nontopological solitons that coherently rotate in field space. We show that these coherent rotations can induce superradiance for scattering waves, thanks to the fact that the scattering involves two coupled modes. Despite the conservation of the particle number in the scattering, the mismatch between the frequencies of the two modes allows for the enhancement of the energy and angular momentum of incident waves. When the Q-ball spins in real space, additional rotational superradiance is also possible, which can further boost the enhancements. We identify the criteria for the energy and angular momentum superradiance to occur.

Positivity in Multifield Effective Field Theories.

We discuss the general method for obtaining full positivity bounds on multifield effective field theories (EFTs). While the leading order forward positivity bounds are commonly derived from the elastic scattering of two (superposed) external states, we show that, for a generic EFT containing three or more low-energy modes, this approach only gives incomplete bounds. We then identify the allowed parameter space as the dual to a spectrahedron, constructed from crossing symmetries of the amplitude, and show that finding the optimal bounds for a given number of modes is equivalent to a geometric problem: finding the extremal rays of a spectrahedron. We show how this is done analytically for simple cases and numerically formulated as semidefinite programming (SDP) problems for more complicated cases. We demonstrate this approach with a number of well-motivated examples in particle physics and cosmology, including EFTs of scalars, vectors, fermions, and gravitons. In all these cases, we find that the SDP approach leads to results that either improve the previous ones or are completely new. We also find that the SDP approach is numerically much more efficient.

Convex Geometry Perspective on the (Standard Model) Effective Field Theory Space.

We present a convex geometry perspective to the effective field theory (EFT) parameter space. We show that the second s derivatives of the forward EFT amplitudes form a convex cone, whose extremal rays are closely connected with states in the UV theory. For tree-level UV completions, these rays are simply theories with all UV particles living in at most one irreducible representation of the symmetries of the theory. In addition, all the extremal rays are determined by the symmetries and can be systematically identified via group theoretical considerations. The implications are twofold. First, geometric information encoded in the EFT space can help reconstruct the UV completion. In particular, we will show that the dim-8 operators are important in reverse engineering the UV physics from the standard model EFT and, thus, deserve more theoretical and experimental investigations. Second, theoretical bounds on the Wilson coefficients can be obtained by identifying the boundaries of the cone and are, in general, stronger than the current positivity bounds. We show explicit examples of these new bounds and demonstrate that they originate from the scattering amplitudes corresponding to entangled states.

Black hole hair in generalized scalar-tensor gravity.

The most general action for a scalar field coupled to gravity that leads to second-order field equations for both the metric and the scalar--Horndeski's theory--is considered, with the extra assumption that the scalar satisfies shift symmetry. We show that in such theories, the scalar field is forced to have a nontrivial configuration in black hole spacetimes, unless one carefully tunes away a linear coupling with the Gauss-Bonnet invariant. Hence, black holes for generic theories in this class will have hair. This contradicts a recent no-hair theorem which seems to have overlooked the presence of this coupling.

Charge-swapping Q balls.

Q balls are nontopological solitonic solutions to a wide class of field theories that possess global symmetries. Here we show that in these same theories there also exists a tower of novel composite Q-ball solutions where, within one composite Q ball, positive and negative charges coexist and swap at a frequency lower than the natural frequency of an individual Q ball. These charge-swapping Q balls are constructed by assembling Q balls and anti-Q balls tightly such that their nonlinear cores overlap. We explain why charge-swapping Q balls can form and why they swap charges.

Are gravitational wave ringdown echoes always equal-interval?

Gravitational wave (GW) ringdown waveforms may contain "echoes" that encode new physics in the strong gravity regime. It is commonly assumed that the new physics gives rise to the GW echoes whose intervals are constant. We point out that this assumption is not always applicable. In particular, if the post-merger object is initially a wormhole, which slowly pinches off and eventually collapses into a black hole, the late-time ringdown waveform exhibit a series of echoes whose intervals are increasing with time. We also assess how this affects the ability of Advanced LIGO/Virgo to detect these new signals.