Lorentz and CPT Violation in Scalar-Mediated Potentials

In Lorentz- and CPT-violating effective field theories involving scalar and spinor fields, there exist forms of Lorentz violation that modify only the scalar-spinor Yukawa interaction vertices. These affect low-energy fermion and antifermion scattering processes through modifications to the nonrelativistic Yukawa potentials. The modified potentials involve novel combinations of momentum, spin, and Lorentz-violating background tensors.Comment: 16 page

The Quotient of a Category by the Action of a Monoidal Category

We introduce the notion of the quotient of a category $C$ by the action $A : M \longrightarrow C \times C$ of a unital symmetric monoidal category $M$. The quotient $C/M$ is a 2-category. We prove its existence and uniqueness by first showing that every small 2-category has a presentation in terms of generators and relations and then describing the generators and relations needed for the quotient $C/M$

A Holographic Bound on Cosmic Magnetic Fields

Magnetic fields large enough to be observable are ubiquitous in astrophysics, even at extremely large length scales. This has led to the suggestion that such fields are seeded at very early (inflationary) times, and subsequently amplified by various processes involving, for example, dynamo effects. Many such mechanisms give rise to extremely large magnetic fields at the end of inflationary reheating, and therefore also during the quark-gluon plasma epoch of the early universe. Such plasmas have a well-known holographic description in terms of a thermal asymptotically AdS black hole. We show that holography imposes an upper bound on the intensity of magnetic fields ($\approx \; 3.6 \times 10^{18}\;\; \text{gauss}$ at the hadronization temperature) in these circumstances; this is above, but not far above, the values expected in some models of cosmic magnetogenesis.Comment: 16 pages, 2 figures, explicit numerical value given for the bound, improved discussion of implications for superadiabatic amplification, version to appear in Nucl Phys

Lorentz Violation in Fermion-Antifermion Decays of Spinless Particles

If Lorentz and CPT violation exist, they could affect the decays of scalar and pseudoscalar particles. For a decay into a fermion and an antifermion (not necessarily of the same mass), both the total decay rate and the outgoing particle distribution may be modified, through interference between the conventional decay mechanism and a separate Lorentz-violating mechanism. The modifications are sensitive to forms of Lorentz violation that are otherwise rather difficult to study, since at tree level they do not affect particle propagation, but only interaction vertices. Using existing experimental data on charged pion decay, it is possible to constrain three parameters in the modified pion-muon-neutrino coupling at better than the $10^{-9}$ level; these are the first bounds on these quantities.Comment: 16 page