Fermi Bubbles: an Elephant in the Gamma-ray Sky

The Fermi bubbles are one of the most remarkable features in the gamma-ray sky revealed by the Fermi Large Area Telescope (LAT). The nature of the gamma-ray emission and the origin of the bubbles are still open questions. In this note, we will review some basic features of leptonic and hadronic modes of gamma-ray production. At the moment, gamma rays are our best method to study the bubbles, but in order to resolve the origin of the bubbles multi-wavelength and multi-messenger observations will be crucial.Comment: Published in proceedings for RICAP16 conferenc

Del Pezzo singularities and SUSY breaking

An analytic construction of compact Calabi-Yau manifolds with del Pezzo singularities is found. We present complete intersection CY manifolds for all del Pezzo singularities and study the complex deformations of these singularities. An example of the quintic CY manifold with del Pezzo 6 singularity and some number of conifold singularities is studied in details. The possibilities for the 'geometric' and ISS mechanisms of dynamical SUSY breaking are discussed. As an example, we construct the ISS vacuum for the del Pezzo 6 singularity.Comment: 40 pages, 5 figures, v2: references adde

Galactic center gamma-ray excess and the Fermi bubbles

Galactic center (GC) is expected to be the brightest source of possible dark matter (DM) annihilation signal. Excess gamma-ray emission has been detected by several groups. Both DM and more conventional astrophysical explanations of the excess have been proposed. In this report, we discuss possible effects of modeling the Fermi bubbles at low latitudes on the GC excess. We consider a template of the Fermi bubbles at low latitudes derived by assuming that the spectrum between 1 GeV and 10 GeV at low latitudes is the same as at high latitudes. We argue that the presence of the Fermi bubbles near the GC may have a significant influence on the spectrum of the GC excess, especially at energies above 10 GeV.Comment: Proceedings of LaThuile 2017 conferenc

Hard and bright gamma-ray emission at the base of the Fermi bubbles

The Fermi bubbles (FBs) are large gamma-ray emitting lobes extending up to $55\deg$ in latitude above and below the Galactic center (GC). Although the FBs were discovered 8 years ago, their origin and the nature of the gamma-ray emission are still unresolved. Understanding the properties of the FBs near the Galactic plane may provide a clue to their origin. Previous analyses of the gamma-ray emission at the base of the FBs, what remains after subtraction of Galactic foregrounds, have shown an increased intensity compared to the FBs at high latitudes, a hard power-law spectrum without evidence of a cutoff up to approximately 1 TeV, and a displacement of the emission to negative longitudes relative to the GC. We analyze 9 years of Fermi Large Area Telescope data in order to study in more detail the gamma-ray emission at the base of the FBs, especially at energies above 10 GeV. We confirm that the gamma-ray emission at the base of the FBs is well described by a simple power law up to 1 TeV energies. The 95% confidence lower limit on the cutoff energy is about 500 GeV. It has larger intensity than the FBs emission at high latitudes and is shifted to the west (negative longitudes) from the GC. If the emission at the base of the FBs is indeed connected to the high-latitude FBs, then the shift of the emission to negative longitudes disfavors models where the FBs are created by the supermassive black hole at the GC. We find that the gamma-ray spectrum can be explained either by gamma rays produced in hadronic interactions or by leptonic inverse Compton scattering. In the hadronic scenario, the emission at the base of the FBs can be explained either by several hundred supernova remnants (SNRs) near the Galactic center or by about 10 SNRs at a distance of ~ 1 kpc. In the leptonic scenario, the necessary number of SNRs is a factor of a few larger than in the hadronic scenario. (abridged)Comment: 24 pages, 18 figures, published in A&

Hopf algebra of ribbon graphs and renormalization

Connes and Kreimer have discovered a Hopf algebra structure behind renormalization of Feynman integrals. We generalize the Hopf algebra to the case of ribbon graphs, i.e. to the case of theories with matrix fields. The Hopf algebra is naturally defined in terms of surfaces corresponding to ribbon graphs. As an example, we discuss renormalization of $\Phi^4$ theory and the 1/N expansion.Comment: 34 pages, 9 figures, Latex; improved styl

Spectral components analysis of diffuse emission processes

We develop a novel method to separate the components of a diffuse emission process based on an association with the energy spectra. Most of the existing methods use some information about the spatial distribution of components, e.g., closeness to an external template, independence of components etc., in order to separate them. In this paper we propose a method where one puts conditions on the spectra only. The advantages of our method are: 1) it is internal: the maps of the components are constructed as combinations of data in different energy bins, 2) the components may be correlated among each other, 3) the method is semi-blind: in many cases, it is sufficient to assume a functional form of the spectra and determine the parameters from a maximization of a likelihood function. As an example, we derive the CMB map and the foreground maps for seven yeas of WMAP data. In an Appendix, we present a generalization of the method, where one can also add a number of external templates.Comment: 21 pages, 7 figure

On the Geometry of Metastable Supersymmetry Breaking

We give a concise geometric recipe for constructing D-brane gauge theories that exhibit metastable SUSY breaking. We present two simple examples in terms of branes at deformed CY singularities.Comment: 31 pages, 9 figures, v2: references adde