Abstract: Gravitational waves (GWs) can be produced by a first-order phase transition in the early Universe via the fluid perturbations induced in the primordial plasma by the expansion and collision of broken-phase bubbles. I will review the production of GWs by the anisotropic stresses of velocity and magnetic fields induced in a first-order phase transition and present recent developments on the analytical estimates and numerical simulations that address the stochastic GW background produced by acoustic motion (sound waves) and magnetohydrodynamic (MHD) turbulence. These GWs could be detectable by current and future GW detectors like LISA or PTA, potentially providing us with direct clean information of the physics at the high energies of the early Universe and probing beyond the Standard Model physics. In addition, the presence of magnetic fields at a phase transition leads to coupled non-linear fluid perturbations, described by MHD turbulence, that will impact the cosmological GW background. The study of these effects can be used to put constraints on primordial magnetic fields. These fields would evolve until present time and leave observable imprints in, for example, the CMB and in the cosmic voids of the large-scale structure of the Universe, allowing us to combine GW observations with other cosmological and astrophysical observations in a multi-messenger approach.

Abstract: We explore, for the first time, neutral-current events at long-baseline experiments to constrain vector and axial-vector neutrino non-standard interactions (NSI) with quarks. We leverage the flavor dependence of NSIs to perform an oscillation analysis in the neutral-current channel.
We first introduce a framework to parametrize the impact of NSIs on the neutrino–nucleus cross section. As an illustrative example, we analyze NOvA neutral-current data, which provide significantly improved constraints on the axial-vector NSI parameters εμμA, εττA, and εeμA.varepsilon_{mumu}^A, varepsilon_{tautau}^A, text{and} varepsilon_{emu}^A.εμμA​, εττA​, and εeμA​.
These constraints are highly complementary to those obtained from SNO.
In addition, we disfavour large values of the diagonal vector NSI parameters εμμVvarepsilon_{mumu}^VεμμV​ and εττVvarepsilon_{tautau}^VεττV​, which arise in the LMA-Dark solution. Finally, we highlight the complementarity between NSI searches at oscillation experiments using charged-current and neutral-current channels.

Abstract: The study of host galaxies is key to understanding the progenitors and the physical mechanisms that originate type Ia supernovae. There is evidence that shows that the spectral characteristics of the supernovae are correlated with the physical properties of the environment. Specifically, the relationship between the silicon photospheric velocity and the properties of the galaxy suggests that high-velocity supernovae (v_si II > 12.000 km/s) may occur in massive environments and could have a sub-Chandrashekar progenitor (Pan et al. 2020). In this work, we present the analysis of local and global scale environments of +300 type Ia supernovae with measured photospheric silicon velocities from early spectra. Employing Integral Field Spectroscopy host galaxy observations from PMAS, MaNGA, and MUSE, we find that high-velocity supernovae can also be found in low and medium-mass galaxies as well as in low-metallicity environments. We conclude that the correlation between the Si II velocities and the environment may exist, but also be affected by observational biases towards high-mass galaxies, in agreement with Burgaz et al. 2024.

Abstract: This could be a very short talk. But it won’t. Current quantum computers can already simulate quantum systems at a scale beyond the reach of Earth’s largest (classical) supercomputers. The real question is: what are current quantum computing experiments good for? [Spoiler: I don’t know; but I was hoping that if I give this talk many times, someone will come up with a great idea.] I will summarize the currently available experiments (digital and analog) and try to bridge the language barrier between quantum computing and condensed matter / high energy physics. By the end of the talk, maybe you can tell me what we should be doing with a square grid of about 100 qubits, coherently evolving (through nearest-neighbor two-qubit interactions or gates) for about 50 time cycles.