On thermal corrections to near-threshold annihilation

We consider non-relativistic "dark" particles interacting through gauge boson exchange. At finite temperature, gauge exchange is modified in many ways: virtual corrections lead to Debye screening; real corrections amount to frequent scatterings of the heavy particles on light plasma constituents; mixing angles change. In a certain temperature and energy range, these effects are of order unity. Taking them into account in a resummed form, we estimate the near-threshold spectrum of kinetically equilibrated annihilating TeV scale particles. Weakly bound states are shown to "melt" below freeze-out, whereas with attractive strong interactions, relevant e.g. for gluinos, bound states boost the annihilation rate by a factor 4...80 with respect to the Sommerfeld estimate, thereby perhaps helping to avoid overclosure of the universe. Modestly non-degenerate dark sector masses and a way to combine the contributions of channels with different gauge and spin structures are also discussed.Comment: 37 pages. v2: many clarifications and references adde

Design Study of a Superconducting Gantry for Carbon Beam Therapy

This paper describes the design study of a gantry for a carbon beam. The designed gantry is compact such that its size is comparable to the size of the proton gantry. This is possible by introducing superconducting double helical coils for dipole magnets. The gantry optics is designed in such a way that it provides rotation-invariant optics and variable beam size as well as point-to-parallel scanning of a beam. For large-aperture magnet, three-dimensional magnetic field distribution is obtained by invoking a computer code, and a number of particles are tracked by integrating equations of motion numerically together with three-dimensional interpolation. The beam-shape distortion due to the fringe field is reduced to an acceptable level by optimizing the coil windings with the help of genetic algorithm. Higher-order transfer coefficients are calculated and shown to be reduced greatly with appropriate optimization of the coil windings.Comment: 11 pages, 8 figure

Ulrich line bundles on Enriques surfaces with a polarization of degree four

In this paper, we prove the existence of an Enriques surface with a polarization of degree four with an Ulrich bundle of rank one. As a consequence, we prove that general polarized Enriques surfaces of degree four, with the same numerical polarization class, carry Ulrich line bundles.Comment: to appear in a volume of Ann. Univ. Ferrara dedicated to the memory of Alexandru Lasc

Studies of a thermally averaged p-wave Sommerfeld factor

Thermal pair annihilation of heavy particles, such as dark matter or its co-annihilation partners, can be strongly influenced by attractive interactions. We investigate the case that pair annihilation proceeds through a velocity-suppressed $p$-wave operator, in the presence of an SU(3) gauge force. Making use of a non-relativistic effective theory, the thermal average of the pair-annihilation rate is estimated both through a resummed perturbative computation and through lattice simulation, in the range $M/T \sim 10 ... 30$. Bound states contribute to the annihilation process and enhancement factors of up to $\sim 100$ can be found.Comment: 15 page