Publications

Order by: publication date number of citations

• Petro-politics, Gender Violence and Human Trafficking in Nigeria’s Niger Delta Region

  Abosede Omowumi Babatunde

  Mig. Pol. 4, 003 (2025) · published 27 May 2025 | Toggle abstract · pdf

  In Nigeria’s Niger Delta, oil politics by global oil corporation, national government and local leaders perpetuate gender inequalities in the distribution of oil benefits to women in oil communities. Women also bear the greater cost of oil-induced environmental harms which adversely affect their traditional livelihood of farming and fishing. Scholarship on human trafficking in Nigeria focused scant attention on the structural conditions that influenced women experience of human trafficking in extractive contexts. This article examines how oil politics perpetuate gender violence and expose women to human trafficking for sexual exploitation and forced labour in the Niger Delta region. Based on feminist political ecology perspectives and field studies in selected oil communities, the study seeks to explain how oil politics perpetuate women’s socio-economic deprivation, in ways that expose them to human trafficking as victims and accomplice. Women exposure to human trafficking amplify their experience of gender violence and violate their rights and aspiration for emancipation and justice in Nigeria’s oil extractive region. International organizations and policy makers need to consider the global and local dynamics that magnified women’s experience of human trafficking in extractive communities and the wider implications for the global and local efforts to combat human trafficking.

• Boundary condition and reflection anomaly in $2+1$ dimensions

  Jiunn-Wei Chen, Chang-Tse Hsieh, Ryutaro Matsudo

  SciPost Phys. 17, 068 (2024) · published 26 August 2024 | Toggle abstract · pdf

  It is known that the $2+1$d single Majorana fermion theory has an anomaly of the reflection, which is canceled out when 16 copies of the theory are combined. Therefore, it is expected that the reflection symmetric boundary condition is impossible for one Majorana fermion, but possible for 16 Majorana fermions. In this paper, we consider a reflection symmetric boundary condition that varies at a single point, and find that there is a problem with one Majorana fermion. The problem is the absence of a corresponding outgoing wave to a specific incoming wave into the boundary, which leads to the non-conservation of the energy. For 16 Majorana fermions, it is possible to connect every incoming wave to an outgoing wave without breaking the reflection symmetry. In addition, we discuss the connection with the fermion-monopole scattering in $3+1$ dimensions.

• Probing quantum entanglement and collectivity effects in e+p collisions at HERA H1

  Chuan Sun

  SciPost Phys. Proc. 8, 147 (2022) · published 14 July 2022 | Toggle abstract · pdf

  Charged particle multiplicity spectra are measured at HERA H1 in DIS process at 319 GeV. The hadron entropy determined from the multiplicity spectra is compared to the gluon entropy predicted from a quantum-entanglement model. On the other hand, observed collective behaviours in high multiplicity pA, pp and ultra-peripheral PbPb collisions at RHIC and LHC motivate a study in ep collisions. Two- and multi-particle correlations are studied in DIS, as well as photoproduction events with collision energy <Wγp>~270 GeV.

• Inverted pendulum driven by a horizontal random force: statistics of the never-falling trajectory and supersymmetry

  Nikolai A. Stepanov, Mikhail A. Skvortsov

  SciPost Phys. 13, 021 (2022) · published 16 August 2022 | Toggle abstract · pdf

  We study stochastic dynamics of an inverted pendulum subject to a random force in the horizontal direction (Whitney's problem). Considered on the entire time axis, the problem admits a unique solution that always remains in the upper half plane. We formulate the problem of statistical description of this never-falling trajectory and solve it by a field-theoretical technique assuming a white-noise driving. In our approach based on the supersymmetric formalism of Parisi and Sourlas, statistic properties of the never-falling trajectory are expressed in terms of the zero mode of the corresponding transfer-matrix Hamiltonian. The emerging mathematical structure is similar to that of the Fokker-Planck equation, which however is written for the "square root" of the probability distribution function. Our results for the statistics of the non-falling trajectory are in perfect agreement with direct numerical simulations of the stochastic pendulum equation. In the limit of strong driving (no gravitation), we obtain an exact analytical solution for the instantaneous joint probability distribution function of the pendulum's angle and its velocity.

• Sifting composite from elementary models at FCCee and CePC

  Giacomo Cacciapaglia, Aldo Deandrea, Abhishek M. Iyer, Andres Pinto

  SciPost Phys. 14, 170 (2023) · published 26 June 2023 | Toggle abstract · pdf

  New Physics models with either an elementary or composite origin are often associated with a similar imprint in a direct search at colliders, case in point being the production of a light pseudoscalar in association with a monochromatic photon from the decay of a Z boson at future $e+e-$ colliders. We exploit the correlation between the discovery of a signal in the Z decays and electroweak precision measurements as a tool to distinguish a composite model from an elementary scalar one. Our results offer an appealing and rich physics case for future colliders and demonstrate how a lepton collider at the Z mass can be a discovery machine for new physics in the Higgs sector.

• Time evolution of effective central charge and signatures of RG irreversibility after a quantum quench

  Axel Cortes Cubero

  SciPost Phys. 4, 016 (2018) · published 27 March 2018 | Toggle abstract · pdf

  At thermal equilibrium, the concept of effective central charge for massive deformations of two-dimensional conformal field theories (CFT) is well understood, and can be defined by comparing the partition function of the massive model to that of a CFT. This temperature-dependent effective charge interpolates monotonically between the central charge values corresponding to the IR and UV fixed points at low and high temperatures, respectively. We propose a non-equilibrium, time-dependent generalization of the effective central charge for integrable models after a quantum quench, $c_{\rm eff}(t)$, obtained by comparing the return amplitude to that of a CFT quench. We study this proposal for a large mass quench of a free boson, where the charge is seen to interpolate between $c_{\rm eff}=0$ at $t=0$, and $c_{\rm eff}\sim 1$ at $t\to\infty$, as is expected. We use our effective charge to define an "Ising to Tricritical Ising" quench protocol, where the charge evolves from $c_{\rm eff}=1/2$ at $t=0$, to $c_{\rm eff}=7/10$ at $t\to\infty$, the corresponding values of the first two unitary minimal CFT models. We then argue that the inverse "Tricritical Ising to Ising" quench is impossible with our methods. These conclusions can be generalized for quenches between any two adjacent unitary minimal CFT models. We finally study a large mass quench into the "staircase model" (sinh-Gordon with a particular complex coupling). At short times after the quench, the effective central charge increases in a discrete "staircase" structure, where the values of the charge at the steps can be computed in terms of the central charges of unitary minimal CFT models. When the initial state is a pure state, one always finds that $c_{\rm eff}(t\to\infty)\geq c_{\rm eff}(t=0)$, though $c_{\rm eff}(t)$, generally oscillates at finite times. We explore how this constraint may be related to RG flow irreversibility.

• Spin Density Matrix Elements for Exclusive $\rho^{0}$ Meson Muoproduction at COMPASS

  W.~Augustyniak

  SciPost Phys. Proc. 8, 073 (2022) · published 12 July 2022 | Toggle abstract · pdf

  Spin density matrix elements were extracted from COMPASS data for exclusive $\rho^{0}$ meson muoproduction on a liquid hydrogen target. The measurement cover the kinematic range of 1.0 (GeV/$c$)$^2$ $< Q^{2} <$ 10.0 (GeV/$c$)$^2$, 5.0 GeV/$c^2$ $< W <$ 17.0 GeV/$c^2$ and 0.01 (GeV/$c$)$^2$ $<p^{2}_{T} < $ 0.5 (GeV/$c$)$^2$. Here, $W$ denotes the mass of the final hadronic system, $Q^{2}$ the virtuality of the exchanged photon and $p_{T}$ the transverse momentum of the $\rho^{0}$ meson with respect to the virtual-photon direction. We observe a violation of s-channel helicity conservation for the transition $\gamma^{*}_{T} \to \rho^{0}_{L}$. Additionally, we find a dominant contribution of the natural-parity-exchange transitions.

• Entanglement Rényi entropies in celestial holography

  Federico Capone, Andy O’Bannon, Ronnie Rodgers, Somyadip Thakur

  SciPost Phys. 19, 042 (2025) · published 15 August 2025 | Toggle abstract · pdf

  Celestial holography is the conjecture that scattering amplitudes in $(d+2)$-dimensional asymptotically Minkowski spacetimes are dual to correlators of a $d$-dimensional conformal field theory (CFT) on the celestial sphere, called the celestial CFT (CCFT). In a CFT, we can calculate sub-region entanglement Rényi entropies (EREs), including entanglement entropy (EE), from correlators of twist operators, via the replica trick. We argue that CCFT twist operators are holographically dual to cosmic branes in the $(d+2)$-dimensional spacetime, and that their correlators are holographically dual to the $(d+2)$-dimensional partition function (the vacuum-to-vacuum scattering amplitude) in the presence of these cosmic branes. We hence compute the EREs of a spherical sub-region of the CCFT's conformal vacuum, finding the form dictated by conformal symmetry, including a universal contribution determined by the CCFT's sphere partition function (odd $d$) or Weyl anomaly (even $d$). We find that this universal contribution vanishes when $d=4$ mod $4$, and otherwise is proportional to $i$ times the $d^{\textrm{th}}$ power of the $(d+2)$-dimensional long-distance cutoff in Planck units.

• DsTau: study of tau neutrino production with nuclear emulsion in the CERN-SPS

  Ali Murat Guler

  SciPost Phys. Proc. 8, 094 (2022) · published 13 July 2022 | Toggle abstract · pdf

  Tau neutrino is one of the least known particle of Standard Model; there are only few measurements with a limited statistics. The DONUT experiment first reported the tau neutrino interaction cross-section but their measurement suffers from large systematic error of more than $50\%$ which is mainly due to uncertainty in the tau neutrino flux prediction. The tau neutrino cross section is an essential ingredient in neutrino experiments and its precise measurement would enable a search for new physics effects such as testing the Lepton Universality in neutrino interactions. The main goal of the DsTau experiment is to measure an inclusive differential cross-section of a $D_s$ production with a consecutive decay to tau lepton in p-A interactions at the CERN-SPS. The measurement of DsTau will reduce the systematic uncertainty in tau neutrino interaction cross-section to $10\%$ level. The results from the pilot run and the prospect for physics runs in 2021-2022 will be discussed.

• Site-wise dynamic defects in a non-conserving exclusion process

  Nikhil Bhatia, Arvind Kumar Gupta

  SciPost Phys. Core 8, 009 (2025) · published 27 January 2025 | Toggle abstract · pdf

  Motivated by the significant influence of the defects in the dynamics of the natural or man-made transportation systems, we propose an open, dynamically disordered, totally asymmetric simple exclusion process featuring bulk particle attachment and detachment. The site-wise dynamic defects might randomly emerge or vanish at any lattice location, and their presence slows down the motion of the particles. Using a mean-field approach, we obtain an analytical expression for both particle and defect density and validate them using Monte Carlo simulation. The study investigates the steady-state characteristics of the system, including phase transitions, analysis of boundary layers, and phase diagrams. Our approach streamlines the defect dynamics by integrating two parameters into one called the obstruction factor, which helps in determining an effective binding constant. The impact of the obstruction factor on the phase diagram is explored across various combinations of binding constants and detachment rates. A critical value of the obstruction factor is obtained, about which an infinitesimal change results in a substantial qualitative change in the structure of the phase diagrams. Further, the effect of the detachment rate is studied, and critical values along which the system observes a quantitative transition of the stationary phases are obtained as a function of the obstruction factor. Overall, the system shows stationary phases ranging from three to seven depending upon the value of the obstruction factor, the binding constant, and the detachment rate. Moreover, we scrutinized the impact of the obstruction factor on the shock dynamics and found no finite-size effect.