We propose a modified Polyakov-loop Nambu–Jona-Lasinio (mPNJL) model in which the Polyakov potential is given by an explicit dependence on the quark chemical potential, allowing it to remain finite at zero temperature and thus to describe the confinement-deconfinement transition in cold dense matter. Combining this modified quark sector with hadronic equations of state via a Maxwell construction, we find that, depending on the model parameters, the equation of state can exhibit either two phase transitions, from hadronic matter to confined (quarkyonic) quark matter and subsequently to deconfined quark matter, or a single transition directly from hadronic to deconfined quark matter or from hadronic to quarkyonic quark matter. Stable massive cold hybrid stars with only quarkyonic and/or deconfined quark phases are obtained. We systematically examine how the parameters of the modified Polyakov potential and the quark vector interactions control the location of these transitions, and find that repulsive vector interactions are essential to obtain a stable quark core. Hybrid stars with quarkyonic and/or a deconfined core can reach maximum masses above 2M⊙, provided a sufficiently stiff hadronic equation of state is used at low density. In the core of the maximum-mass configurations, the speed of sound exceeds the conformal limit,

 square of speed of sound = 1/3, for the quarkyonic core stars. This work establishes the qualitative role of each model parameter in shaping hybrid-star structure.

One figure is attached : This figure shows the baryonic density profile from center (r=0) towards surface (r=R ~14 km) for a maximum mass stable star containing three phases : (i) Deconfined quark (ii) Confined quark ( Quarkyonic) (iii) Hadronic.

Hadronic tau decays provide a unique low-energy laboratory for the charged-current interaction between quarks and leptons. Their use as an electroweak precision sector is, however, limited by nonperturbative QCD dynamics in the resonance region, encoded in hadronic form factors. In this work we show that angular information in two-hadron tau decays can be used to construct observables in which these form factors cancel, leading to first-principles Standard Model predictions up to light-quark-mass and radiative corrections. We derive the fully differential distributions for arbitrary two-pseudoscalar final states, including tau polarization, and extend them to the Weak Effective Field Theory at linear order in new-physics couplings. We then illustrate our strategy with several benchmark observables, for both unpolarized and polarized taus, whose Standard Model predictions can be obtained without modelling the dominant hadronic form factors and which receive characteristic beyond-the-Standard-Model corrections, in particular from tensor currents. These results provide concrete targets for Belle II, polarized-tau proposals such as Chiral Belle, and future high-statistics facilities, including super-tau-charm factories and FCC-ee, to test the electroweak structure of hadronic tau decays.

Trapped ions provide a highly controllable platform for quantum computation with discrete variables, encoded in internal electronic states. At the same time, their collective phonon modes offer a natural continuous-variable Hilbert space with bosonic statistics. This hybrid qubit/qumode structure offers a promising route to simulating quantum field theories with both matter and gauge degrees of freedom. 

In this talk,  I will discuss how phonon modes of trapped ions can be used to encode gauge bosons, and present a quantum signal processing protocol to compute Wilson lines. This construction can serve as a subroutine for full quantum simulations of lattice gauge theories, and may also provide quantum-accelerated methods for classical lattice gauge theory simulations.

Contrary to naive expectations, poles used to define hadron resonances rigorously in the physical world may not evolve continuously to become degenerate in the SU(3) flavor and chiral limits of QCD. Instead, other shadow poles, usually ignored, may be the ones that degenerate and characterize the resonances in these limits. This feature is general, and we illustrate it first with the simple and familiar light-vector mesons, followed by the much-discussed light-scalar case. Their shadow poles and their degeneracy are found using the QCD low-energy effective theory unitarized to one loop.

Based on: 2606.14634

Understanding the properties of atomic nuclei and their connection to astrophysical phenomena requires reliable theoretical models together with increasingly precise experimental constraints. In this seminar, I will present some of my recent work spanning nuclear structure, nuclear astrophysics, and data-driven nuclear modelling. I will first discuss the electric dipole response of finite nuclei and how dipole polarizability can provide constraints on the density dependence of the nuclear symmetry energy and on neutron-star properties. I will then address low-energy electric dipole strength in neutron-rich nuclei and its impact on astrophysical neutron-capture and photodisintegration reaction rates, with particular emphasis on the role of strength near the particle-emission threshold. Finally, I will present recent applications of machine-learning and quantum-machine-learning methods to nuclear mass predictions, including ensemble-based approaches and physics-informed feature representations. These studies illustrate complementary ways in which nuclear observables, microscopic models, and modern computational methods can be combined to improve the predictive description of nuclei across the nuclear chart.

The theoretical prediction of the muon anomalous magnetic moment aµ depends crucially on the Hadronic Vacuum Polarization (HVP), and the tension between its dispersive and lattice-QCD determinations remains unresolved. We show that part of this puzzle can be addressed in the heavy-quark sector, where both descriptions are theoretically clean, by recognizing that the heavy-quark mass and its contribution to aµ are not independent quantities: both follow from in-tegrals of the same hadronic spectral function, differing only in their integration kernel. Promoting this kernel to a free choice within the relativistic QCD Sum Rules used to determine heavy-quark masses, we break with the conventional notion of a single valid sum rule and instead determine the mass and its HVP contribution simultaneously, from a common, self-consistent framework. This intrinsic construction exploits the anticorrelation between the two quantities to sharpen the final uncertainty, and turns the residual disagreement between the perturbative and hadronic descriptions of the observable into a direct observable-specific diagnostic of residual theory/model dependence, including duality-violation and continuum-modeling effects, unavailable to a determination of the mass alone. We obtain a HVPc+b,LOµ = (14.46(13) + 0.3009(17)) ×10−10 at leading HVPc+b ,NLOa,b and aµ = (−0.5738(95)−0.01822(13))×10−10 at next-to-leading order, for charm and bottom contributions, respectively. We compare our next-to-leading-order results with its first available lattice determination, finding good agreement in the charm sector. As a byproduct, we obtain mc= 1267.1(6.8) MeV and mb = 4182.3(7.2) MeV, with unprecedented phenomenological precision. Beyond these results, the construction introduced here defines a general strategy, appli cable to any observable expressible as a kernel-weighted dispersive integral, for extracting correlated hadronic quantities from a single, unified sum rule.

How much energy does a quantum computer consume? Are they more efficient than their classical counterparts? In this work, we make a step towards answering these questions. We define the energy efficiency of a quantum computer as the ratio of the number of algorithms it can perform during a given time over the energy consumed by the hardware during this time. We analyze the most representative physical platforms currently envisioned to be used as building blocks of quantum computers: superconducting qubits, silicon spin qubits, trapped ions, neutral atoms and photonic qubits. Including insights from experts in all these technologies and taking into account algorithm compilation constraints, we discuss the advantages and inconveniences of each platform from an energy standpoint. Beyond providing concrete values of the energy consumption of current quantum computers, we lay the foundation of a framework to benchmark the energy efficiency of any future quantum computing architecture.