100 research outputs found
Revoking Supervised Release in the Age of Legal Cannabis
(Excerpt)
Supervised release—part of the original sentence following a guilty verdict—is a system by which federal probation officers monitor prisoners released from federal prison. In imposing supervised release, sentencing judges set conditions that each supervisee must comply with, or risk reincarceration at the discretion of the sentencing judge. Certain conditions of supervised release are prescribed by statute and others are crafted by judges.
If a defendant violates the terms of supervised release by possessing cannabis products, the statutory regime provides the sentencing judge with two options: revoke the defendant’s supervised release and reincarcerate her or, alternatively, release the defendant from the supervised release program altogether. While district judges are not often confronted with cannabis related revocations, as state and federal cannabis laws have diverged, judges have increasingly faced serious questions of penological philosophy when asked to punish those engaged in cannabis use sanctioned by state law but proscribed by federal law. This Note highlights the sources of those burgeoning areas of conflict and suggest numerous ways that these conflicts might be resolved
Detectable, defect-free dark photon dark matter
Ultralight dark photons are compelling dark matter candidates, but their
allowed kinetic mixing with the Standard Model photon is severely constrained
by requiring that the dark photons do not collapse into a cosmic string network
in the early Universe. Direct detection in minimal production scenarios for
dark photon dark matter is strongly limited, if not entirely excluded;
discovery of sub-meV dark photon dark matter would therefore point to a
nonminimal dark sector. We describe a model that evades such constraints,
capable of producing cold dark photons in any parameter space accessible to
future direct detection experiments. The associated production dynamics yield
additional signatures in cosmology and small-scale structure, allowing for
possible positive identification of this particular class of production
mechanisms
Probing neutrino interactions and dark radiation with gravitational waves
After their generation, cosmological backgrounds of gravitational waves
propagate nearly freely but for the expansion of the Universe and the
anisotropic stress of free-streaming particles. Primordial signals -- both that
from inflation and the infrared spectrum associated to subhorizon production
mechanisms -- would carry clean information about the cosmological history of
these effects. We study the modulation of the standard damping of gravitational
waves by free-streaming radiation due to the decoupling (or recoupling) of
interactions. We focus on nonstandard neutrino interactions in effect after the
decoupling of weak interactions as well as more general scenarios in the early
Universe involving other light relics. We develop semianalytic results in fully
free-streaming scenarios to provide intuition for numerical results that
incorporate interaction rates with a variety of temerpature dependencies.
Finally, we compute the imprint of neutrino interactions on the -mode
polarization of the cosmic microwave background, and we comment on other means
to infer the presence of such effects at higher frequencies.Comment: 33 pages, 8 figures; matches published versio
Dark photon dark matter from an oscillating dilaton
We present a mechanism for generating ultralight dark photon dark matter in
the early Universe via a dilatonlike scalar field coupled to the dark photon's
kinetic term. Energy is initially stored in the condensate of the dilaton,
which resonantly produces dark photons when it begins oscillating in the early
Universe. While similar scenarios with axion--dark-photon couplings require
large coupling coefficients to fully populate the dark photon, the dilatonic
coupling features a unique regime: when the dark photon's mass is half that of
the dilaton, dark photons are copiously produced even when the dilaton
undergoes small-amplitude oscillations. Scenarios consistent with the cosmic
microwave background allow for ultralight vector dark matter with mass as light
as eV.Comment: 9 pages, 1 figur
Gauge preheating with full general relativity
We study gauge preheating following pseudoscalar-driven inflation in full
general relativity. We implement the Baumgarte-Shapiro-Shibata-Nakamura (BSSN)
scheme to solve the full nonlinear evolution of the metric alongside the
dynamics of the pseudoscalar and gauge fields. The dynamics of the background
and emission of gravitational waves are broadly consistent with simulations in
a Friedmann-Lema\^{i}tre-Robertson-Walker (FLRW) spacetime. We find large,
localized overdensities in the BSSN simulations of order , and the dimensionless power spectrum of
peaks above unity. These overdense regions are seeded on length scales only
slightly smaller than the horizon, and have a compactness . The
scale of peak compactness is shorter than the Jeans length, which implies that
pressure of the matter fields plays an important role in the evolution of these
objects.Comment: 32 pages, 9 figure
- …