Bologna-Firenze-Pisa Meetings in Theoretical Physics II

Friday 31 Jan 2025, 08:00 → 18:00 Europe/Rome

Sala Altana (Palazzo Strozzi)

This event will bring together the theoretical physics groups of Bologna, Firenze and Pisa to discuss recent advances in both high energy theory and phenomenology. 

This edition we'll feature one speaker from each representative institution:

• Dario Buttazzo (INFN-Pi)
• Giorgio Leone (SNS)
• Silvia Pascoli (UniBO)
• Diego Redigolo (INFN-Fi)

 

The event will be kindly hosted by the school of political sciences of Scuola Normale, based in Palazzo Strozzi, a 10 minute walk from Florence's main station (S.M.N.).

The meeting will take place in "Aula Altana," on the 4th floor, a large room with capacity to host up to 100 participants.

1 Diego Redigolo: The Dark Sector and the Large Scale Structure of the Universe

Ongoing large-scale structure (LSS) surveys offer significant promise in revealing the dynamics of the dark sector. In this talk, I will explore how LSS observations can probe phenomena such as dark matter self-interactions, the existence of new species with non-zero sound speed, and phase transitions in the late Universe—processes that are largely inaccessible through early-Universe data alone.

I will demonstrate how making reliable predictions for these scenarios requires extending the Effective Field Theory (EFT) of LSS, incorporating new parameters that account for the exotic dynamics of the dark sector. These extensions provide an exciting opportunity to test deviations from the standard ΛCDM model, offering new insights into the nature of dark matter, and potentially revealing its properties purely through the way it gravitates, without relying on any interaction with the Standard Model.

2 Silvia Pascoli: Exploring sub-GeV rich dark sectors

The existence of neutrino masses, the baryon asymmetry and dark matter calls for new physics beyond the Standard Model. In the search for the new physics scale, dark sectors, i.e. extensions below the electroweak one, have recently receive great attention. Going beyond minimality, I will argue that rich dark sectors, that have multiple new particles and interactions, can explain evidences BSM, e.g. sub-GeV DM and neutrino masses, and have a unique phenomenology that is very different from that of the minimal dark sector models. I will present three examples: heavy neutral leptons in neutrino experiments, dark photons at NA64 and dark scalars in connection with PTA gravitational waves, and I will highlight experimental strategies that could offer new opporunities.

3 Giorgio Leone: Dai-Freed anomalies in String Theory

Anomalies impose severe constraints on quantum theories and have been extremely useful in shaping the string theory landscape. Although the role played by traditional local and global anomalies has been extensively exploited, recent results suggest the presence of additional non-perturbative anomalies arising from space-time topology change, the so-called Dai-Freed anomalies. In this talk, I will introduce the main idea behind such new anomalies and I will explore their role in six-dimensional supergravity theories with simply-laced gauge groups and one tensor multiplet in explicit computable cases. I will then apply the same analysis to a specific non-supersymmetric tachyon-free example in string theory and I will comment on recent progress towards a complete characterisation of these anomalies in six dimensions.

4 Dario Buttazzo: Physics at muon colliders

High-energy muon colliders have recently gained renewed interest within the particle physics community. In this talk I will review the key features and challenges of such a machine, discussing the main opportunities for both new physics searches at the energy frontier and precision measurements.