Dark antiatoms can explain DAMA

We show that the existence of a sub-dominant form of dark matter, made of dark antiatoms of mass and size of the order of 1 TeV and 30 fm respectively, can explain the results of direct detection experiments, with a positive signal in DAMA/NaI and DAMA/LIBRA and no signal in other experiments. The signal comes from the binding of the dark antiatoms to thallium, a dopant in DAMA, and is not present for the constituent atoms of other experiments. The dark antiatoms are made of two particles oppositely charged under a dark U(1) symmetry and can bind to terrestrial atoms because of a kinetic mixing between the photon and the massless dark photon, such that the dark particles acquire an electric millicharge of the order of 0.0005e. This millicharge enables them to bind to high-Z atoms via radiative capture, after they thermalize in terrestrial matter through elastic collisions.Comment: 18 pages, 5 figure

The structure and analytic properties of the scattering amplitude at LHC energies

Elastic proton-proton scattering is reviewed starting from the results of the LHC experiments conducted by the TOTEM and ATLAS collaborations, and the HEGS model and a simple phenomenological parametrisation are compared with the new data on the differential elastic proton-proton scattering cross section, which detect a non-exponential behaviour of the differential cross sections in the first diffraction cone. We consider the influence of various assumptions on the extraction of the elastic scattering parameters, and on the deduction of the total cross section.Comment: 5 pages, 2 figures, talk presented at EDS Blois 2017, Prague, Czech Republic, June 26-30,201

Pseudoscalar Vertex and Quark Masses

We analyse available data on the quark pseudoscalar vertex and extract the contribution og the Goldstone boson pole. The strength of the pole is found to be quite large at presently accessible scales. We draw the important consequences of this finding for the various definitions of quark masses.Comment: LATTICE99 (Improvement and Renormalization), 3 p., 3 fi

The importance of the Einstein Telescope for Belgian science

Introductory talk to the conference "The Einstein Telescope project

Impact of saturation on spin effects in proton-proton scattering

For pomerons described by a sum of two simple-pole terms, a soft and a hard pomeron, the unitarity bounds from saturation in impact-parameter space are examined. We consider the effect of these bounds on observables linked with polarisation, such as the analyzing power A(N) in elastic proton-proton scattering, for LHC energies. We obtain the s and t dependence of the Coulomb-nuclear interference at small momentum transfer, and show that the effect of the hard pomeron may be observed at the LHC

Asymptotics of the S-matrix and unitarisation

The manner in which the elastic scattering amplitude obeys unitarity, how it enters the circle of unitarity, and what its asymptotic limit is, remains a problem for models which include terms that rise fast with s. We have checked that the features of cross sections which come from unitarisation are present for most unitarisation schemes, e.g. those that saturate the profile function or those that describe multiple exchanges via an analytic formula. We have also obtained a scheme which interpolates between different classes of the unitarisation and found corresponding non-linear equations. Considering different forms of energy dependence of the scattering amplitude, and a variety of unitarisation schemes, we show that, in order to reproduce the data, the fits choose an amplitude that corresponds to an asymptotic value S = 0

Can axionlike particles explain the alignments of the polarizations of light from quasars?

peer reviewedThe standard axion-like particle explanation of the observed large-scale coherent orientations of quasar polarisation vectors is ruled out by the recent measurements of vanishing of circular polarisation. We introduce a more general wave-packet formalism and show that, although decoherence effects between waves of different frequencies can reduce significantly the amount of circular polarisation, the axion-like particle hypothesis is disfavoured given the bandwidth with which part of the observations were performed. Finally, we show that a more sophisticated model of extragalactic fields does not lead to an alignment of polarisations

Some potential problems of OHe composite dark matter

Among composite-dark-matter scenarios, one of the simplest and most predictive is that of O-helium (OHe) dark atoms, in which a lepton-like doubly charged particle O is bound with a primordial helium nucleus, and is the main constituent of dark matter. This model liberates the physics of dark matter from many unknown features of new physics, and it demands a deep understanding of the details of known nuclear and atomic physics, which are still somewhat unclear in the case of nuclear interacting "atomic" shells. So far the model has relied on the dominance of elastic scattering of OHe with the matter. In view of the uncertainty in our understanding of OHe interaction with nuclei we study the opposite scenario, in which inelastic nuclear reactions dominate the OHe interactions with nuclei. We show that in this case all the OHe atoms bind with extra He nuclei, forming doubly charged O-beryllium ions, which behave like anomalous helium, causing potential problems with overabundance of anomalous isotopes in terrestrial matter.Comment: To appear in Proceedings of the 17th Bled Workshop "What Comes Beyond Standard Models?

The proton inelastic cross section at ultrahigh energies

We study the consequences of high-energy collider data on the best fits to total, elastic, and inelastic cross sections for $pp$ and $p\bar{p}$ scattering using two very distinct unitarisation schemes: the eikonal and the $U$-matrix. Despite their analytic differences, we find that the two schemes lead to almost identical predictions up to EeV energies, with differences only becoming significant at GUT-scale and higher energies.Comment: 7 pages, 4 figure