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 $B$-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

Prescription Drug Monitoring Programs: Evolution and Evidence

This Issue Brief reviews the current status and characteristics of PDMPs, their use, and evidence of their effectiveness. It summarizes best practices for PDMPs and the needs for further research and evaluation

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 $10^{-20}$ 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 $\delta = \delta\rho/\rho \sim 30$, and the dimensionless power spectrum of $\delta$ peaks above unity. These overdense regions are seeded on length scales only slightly smaller than the horizon, and have a compactness $C \sim 0.1$. 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