Why trust? A mixed-method investigation of the origins and meaning of trust during the COVID-19 lockdown in Denmark

Trust is highlighted as central to effective disease management. During the COVID-19 pandemic, Denmark seemed to embody this understanding. Characterizing the Danish response were high levels of public compliance with government regulations and restrictions coupled with high trust in the government and other members of society. In this article, we first revisit prior claims about the importance of trust in securing compliant citizen behaviour based on a weekly time-use survey that we conducted during the first weeks of the COVID-19 pandemic (2 April–18 May 2020). Analysis of activity episodes, rather than merely self-reported compliance, both reconfirms the importance of institutional trust and nuances prior suggestions of detrimental effects of trust in other citizens. These survey-based results are further augmented through thematic analysis of 21 in-depth interviews with respondents sampled from the survey participants. The qualitative analysis reveals two themes, the first focusing on trust in others in Danish society and the second on the history of trust in Denmark. Both themes are based on narratives layered in cultural, institutional and inter-personal levels and further underline that institutional and social trust are complementary and not countervailing. We conclude by discussing how our analysis suggests pathways towards an increased social contract between governments, institutions and individuals that might be of use during future global emergencies and to the overall functioning of democracies

Imagining Life Beyond a Crisis: A Four Quadrant Model to Conceptualize Possible Futures

In this article we report evidence from a series of semi-structured interviews with a broad sample of people living in Denmark (n = 21), about their perspectives on the future during the first months of the global Covid-19 pandemic. The thematic and discursive analyses, based on an abductive ontology, illustrate imaginings of the future along two vectors: individual to collective and descriptive to moral. On a descriptive and individual level, people imagined getting through the pandemic on a myopic day-by-day basis; on a descriptive and collective level, people imagined changes to work and socializing. Their future was bound and curtailed by their immediate present. On a moral and individual level, respondents were less detailed in their reports, but some vowed to change their behaviors. On a moral and collective level, respondents reported what the world should be like and discussed changes to environmental behaviors such as traveling, commuting, and work. The model suggests the domain of individual moral imaginings is the most difficult domain for people to imagine beyond the practicalities of their everyday lives. The implications of this model for comprehending imaginations of the future are discussed

Leptoquark manoeuvres in the dark: a simultaneous solution of the dark matter problem and the RD(*) anomalies

The measured branching fractions of B-mesons into leptonic final states derived by the LHCb, Belle and BaBar collaborations hint towards the breakdown of lepton flavour universality. In this work we take at face value the so-called RD(*) observables that are defined as the ratios of neutral B-meson charged-current decays into a D-meson, a charged lepton and a neutrino final state in the tau and light lepton channels. A well-studied and simple solution to this charged current anomaly is to introduce a scalar leptoquark S that couples to the second and third generation of fermions. We investigate how S can also serve as a mediator between the Standard Model and a dark sector. We study this scenario in detail and estimate the constraints arising from collider searches for leptoquarks, collider searches for missing energy signals, direct detection experiments and the dark matter relic abundance. We stress that the production of a pair of leptoquarks that decays into different final states (i.e. the commonly called “mixed” channels) provides critical information for identifying the underlying dynamics, and we exemplify this by studying the tτbν and the resonant S plus missing energy channels. We find that direct detection data provides non-negligible constraints on the leptoquark coupling to the dark sector, which in turn affects the relic abundance. We also show that the correct relic abundance can not only arise via standard freeze-out, but also through conversion-driven freeze-out. We illustrate the rich phenomenology of the model with a few selected benchmark points, providing a broad stroke of the interesting connection between lepton flavour universality violation and dark matter.The work of AJ is supported in part by a KIAS Individual Grant No. QP084401 via the Quantum Universe Center at Korea Institute for Advanced Study and by the National Research Foundation of Korea, Grant No. NRF-2019R1A2C1009419. The work of AL was supported by the São Paulo Research Foundation (FAPESP), project 2015/20570-1. JH acknowledges support from the DFG via the Collaborative Research Center TRR 257 and the F.R.S.-FNRS as a Chargé de recherche. The work of AP and GB was funded by the RFBR and CNRS project number 20-52-15005. The work of AP was also supported in part by an AAP-USMB grant and by the Interdisciplinary Scientific and Educational School of Moscow University for Fundamental and Applied Space Research. The work of DS is based upon work supported by the National Science Foundation under Grant No. PHY-1915147. JZ is supported by the Generalitat Valenciana (Spain) through the plan GenT program (CIDEGENT/2019/068), by the Spanish Government (Agencia Estatal de Investigación) and ERDF funds from European Commission (MCIN/AEI/10.13039/501100011033, Grant No. PID2020-114473GB-I00)

Production of long-lived staus in the Drell-Yan process

We investigate the phenomenology of the gravitino dark matter scenario with a stau as the next-to-lightest supersymmetric particle at the LHC. For a wide range of gravitino masses the lighter stau is stable on the scale of a detector and gives rise to a prominent signature as a "slow muon". The direct stau production via the Drell-Yan process is always present and independent of the mass spectrum of the other superparticles, thus providing a lower bound for the discovery potential of this scenario. Performing a careful analysis with particular emphasis on the criteria for observing stau pairs and for distinguishing them from the background, we find that the 14 TeV run of the LHC has a promising potential for finding long-lived staus from Drell-Yan production up to very large stau masses.Comment: 15 pages + references, 12 eps figures; v2: analysis for 7 TeV LHC added, other results unchanged, minor improvements in presentation, references added; v3: presentation improved, matches journal versio