Muon colliders are being currently considered as a next step for HEP [1]. Since muons, as electrons, are fundamental particles, their full energy is available in collisions, in contrast to protons. Nonetheless, the finite mean lifetime of muons (2.2 μs at rest) means that the muons must be collected, cooled, and rapidly accelerated before a significant number of them decay. Plasma accelerators...
In this talk, we present simplified Dark Matter (DM) models for particle mediators between the Dark Sector and the Standard Model of particle physics. We focus on DM mediators produced in the s-channel together with a top quark pair, which are expected to be within experimental reach of the LHC.
We explore the experimental sensitivity obtained from CP-sensitive variables used in Higgs...
Quantum Chromodynamics (QCD), the theory describing strong interactions, is known to exhibit collective behaviour at high temperature and density, as in the Quark-Gluon Plasma (QGP) - a rapidly expanding, nearly perfect liquid that filled the early universe. Due to its unique properties, the QGP is the main object of study in ultra-relativistic heavy ion colliders, such as RHIC (at Brookhaven...
Dark matter remains a central mystery of modern-day science. The elusiveness of dark matter candidates in colliders suggests we further search for its true nature where it was first unveiled
- in astrophysics via its gravitational effects. In particular, the new golden age in strong gravity
- with the gravitational wave era and remarkable new electromagnetic observations of compact objects...
Radiotherapy (RT) is a safe and well-established medical treatment modality, defined by decades of clinical application, used alone or in combination with surgery and/or chemotherapy. It’s used especially in cancer treatment, with the aim to destroy tumour growth while minimising damage to the surrounding healthy tissue[1-3]. One of the most important effects of RT, at a cellular level, is the...
Several studies show that the combination of high-Z nanoparticles and external radiotherapy leads to an increased radiation effect in tumoral cells without an increase of the patient dose.
However, it is not yet clear how the sequence of physical, chemical, and biological mechanisms contributes to the observed synergic effect.The objective of this work is to develop simulation tools that...
The discovery of ultra-high energy (UHE) photons, whose production is expected through cosmic-ray interactions with the source environment, would allow the identification of the astrophysical sources of UHE cosmic rays and unveil many of the mysteries surrounding their production and propagation. The field of high energy photons has had, in the last year, a couple of exciting findings with...
The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) is the highest energy particle accelerator ever built. The High Luminosity LHC Upgrade, expected for the years 2026-2028, will increase the LHC collision rate up to a factor 7 with respect to the nominal values, to allow acquiring a huge amount of data and pushing the limits of our understanding of Nature. The ATLAS experiment, which records the proton and ion...
We present a novel method for the calculation of Light-Front Wavefunctions (LFWF) from the hadronic Bethe-Salpeter Wavefunctions.
This problem is of great importance, for example, in the study of hadrons — the particles composed of quarks and gluons described by Quantum Chromodynamics (QCD). The study of hadrons on the light-front allows for the calculation of several hadronic structure...
The ability to measure the radiation effects on healthy and tumorous tissue at the microscale is essential and still presents a huge challenge. There are some instruments that can make such measurements, but most of these are bigger than the size of a cell, and the measured dose is integrated over a small volume. These instruments are unable to produce microscopic descriptions about how the...
In heavy-ion collisions in RHIC and at the LHC a nearly perfect fluid state of matter is generated, the QGP, expanding to the surrounding detector in a very short timescale. Jets, collimated sprays of hadrons reconstructed by some clustering algorithm, are very well understood in the absence of this dense medium and are, not only for this reason, amongst the prime tools to study this state of...
The focus of my PhD thesis at LIP is the measurement of PeVatrons with the future Southern Wide-field Gamma-ray Observatory (SWGO), which will have the ability to survey the Galactic centre. Currently, I am working on the exploration of extended air shower characteristics, looking in particular for quantities that can improve SWGO’s gamma/hadron separation capabilities, in the effort of...
I explore the modified gravity theory which goes by the name of f(R,T) gravity, and study possible cosmological background evolutions and sudden singularities, as well, as constraints from big bang nucleosynthesis.
In this work in progress, we consider a modified version of the Warm Little Inflaton inflationary model by eliminating one of the fields interacting with the inflaton field. At a first instance, this appears to preclude the slow-roll dynamics by introducing large corrections to the slow-roll eta parameter. However, we show that this behaviour is fictitious and, in reality, the temporal average...
N. Torrado 1, N. Lopes 1, J. Fernando Silva 2, C. Amoedo 3 and A.Sublet 3
1 GoLP/IPFN, Instituto Superior Técnico, Lisbon, Portugal
2 INESC-ID, Instituto Superior Técnico, Lisbon, Portugal
3 CERN, Geneva, Switzerland
The AWAKE experiment, running at CERN, investigates particle acceleration in plasma wakefield [1]. Since the current plasma source (10 m long and created in a rubidium...
In the past two decades there has been tremendous progress in the theoretical and experimental investigation of multiquark states, which has expanded our understanding of what a “hadron” is. Experimental evidence suggests that Nature does not only form “conventional” hadrons such as mesons as quark-antiquark states and baryons as three-quark states, but also more exotic combinations such as...
Author(s)
Pedro Teixeira1, Alberto Blanco2, Bento Caldeira1, Bernardo Tomé2, Isabel Alexandre3, João Matos4, Jorge Silva5, José Borges1, Lorenzo Cazon6, Luís Afonso2, Luís Lopes2, Magda Duarte7, Mário Pimenta2, 3, Mourad Bezzeghoud1, Paolo Dobrilla2, Pedro Assis2, 3, Raul Sarmento2, Rui Oliveira1, Sofia Andringa2
1 Physics Department (ECT), Institute of Earth Sciences (ICT/IIFA), Earth...
In the standard ΛCDM model, bounded structures would not have formed until the late universe because of the following premises: gravity is the dominant force responsible for matter clustering, and primordial density perturbations follow a nearly scale-invariant spectrum at all scales. Still, it should not be like that in an alternative cosmology. We consider a light scalar field - which can be...
In Proton Therapy (PT), the highly conformal dose irradiation of the tumors makes this technique very powerful, resulting in better treatment outcomes, survival rates, and overall quality of life for cancer patients. However, the characteristics of the depth-dose profile (Bragg-Peak) demands for an extremely precise beam control since the dose profile is much more sensitive to spatial...
The reconstruction of trajectories of charged particles is one of the the most complex and CPU consuming stages of event reconstruction in particle physics experiments. At the High Luminosity Large Hadron Collider (HL-LHC), up to 200 proton-proton collisions happen during a single bunch crossing, which leads on average to tens of thousands of particles emerging from the interaction region....
Seeking for the variation of fundamental constants is a crucial step in our quest to go beyond our standard models of fundamental physics. Implementing such variations in a self-consistent way can be achieved by coupling a scalar field to the theory. In the generalized Bekenstein model the field is coupled to both dark matter and the cosmological constant, leading to variations of the...
We study the phenomenology of the Higgs-Dilaton model in the context of EinsteinCartan gravity, focusing on the separate impact of the Holst and Nieh-Yan terms on the inflationary observables. Using analytical and numerical techniques, we show the predictions of these scenarios to display an attractor-like behavior intrinsically related to the curvature of the field-space manifold in the...
Dust grains are key ingredients in understanding the interstellar medium (ISM) and the largest effects of dust on astronomical observations, the extinction of light in the line of sight and the wavelength dependent reddening it causes, both affecting distance measurements for cosmology when using extragalactic sources such as supernovae. The shape, orientation and distribution of the dust...
We report the results of the first comprehensive study on the shadows of fundamental Kerr black holes with Proca hair. Some of these solutions show striking non-Kerr features, such as chaotic patterns, non-smooth shadow edges, and ghost shadows. We illustrate how fundamental photon orbits can help us understand some of these features. Nonetheless, a wide range of solutions where deviations...
The Standard Model (SM) can be considered an effective low-energy expression of a
more fundamental theory. There are some observed phenomena not explained by the SM the existence of dark matter (DM) being one of them.
The monotop signature with one top quark and missing transverse energy in the final state can be a powerful probe of specific DM signals. The search for DM can also be done...
The dynamics of hadron formation are still not fully understood due to the complex nature of QCD and the difficulty of studying it through analytical perturbative calculations. Quarkonia are the simplest possible bound states and thus provide the ideal window through which to study this open problem.
Exploiting the large volume of quarkonium data produced at the LHC, we are working, within...
