arXiv subjects

Tanumoy Mandal

Publications and source records attributed to Tanumoy Mandal.

At least 19 recordsLinked to original sources

arXiv2026

Observables and conformal properties of dark matter admixed isentropic neutron stars

We construct an equation of state for isentropic dark-matter-admixed neutron stars (DMANS) with a hot core and relatively cold crust incorporating self-consistent temperature and DM density profiles for GeV-scale fermionic DM. We show that the enhancement of central stellar density due to DM accumulation, previously reported for cold neutron stars, remains robust. Substantial observable effects of DM accumulation arise only for sufficiently massive stellar configurations. Similar to earlier studies of cold NS, the speed of sound profile is shown to exhibit non-monotonic behavior for sufficiently large DM density in the core. We identify a competition between thermal effects due to nonzero values of entropy per baryon and softening effects of the dark sector which drive macroscopic properties and conformality indicators in opposite directions. This competition determines the onset of conformality near the stellar core and indicates that conformality signatures attributed to quark-matter in cold NS could be mimicked by DM admixture in isentropic stars.

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arXiv2026

Non-standard decays of vector-like top partners in a $2$-Higgs doublet model at the HL-LHC

Extensions of the Standard Model featuring both an enlarged scalar sector and vector-like fermions arise naturally in a wide class of well-motivated theoretical frameworks. In such scenarios, vector-like Quarks (VLQs) can exhibit non-standard decay modes involving additional Higgs states, giving rise to distinctive collider signatures that remain largely unexplored by existing experimental searches. We investigate the prospects of probing this possibility at the high-luminosity Large Hadron Collider (HL-LHC) through the decay of vector-like top partner ($T$) to charged Higgs ($H^{\pm}$) followed by the decay, $H^\pm\toτν$, producing a final state containing two tau leptons, two $b$-jets, and missing transverse energy. A model-independent collider analysis is performed using global kinematic observables constructed from visible objects and the missing transverse momentum vector to suppress the dominant backgrounds. Polarization-sensitive observables built from the hadronic $τ$ decay products are also examined as complementary probes of the spin-$0$ origin of the $τ$ leptons. The expected discovery sensitivity is evaluated using the Asimov significance for an integrated luminosity of $3$ ab$^{-1}$ at $\sqrt{s}=14$ TeV. Our results demonstrate that the $2τ\:+\:2b\:+$ missing $E_T$ channel provides a promising and largely orthogonal avenue to search for non-standard VLQ decays in extended Higgs sectors, with discovery-level sensitivity achievable for VLQ masses up to approximately $1.9$ TeV.

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arXiv2026

Testing varying coupling constants through multi-Higgs production at the LHC

We propose the One Scalar Theory (1ST), a minimalist framework where a single real singlet scalar field mediates the dynamical generation of the Higgs self-coupling and the top Yukawa coupling. Unlike generic portal models, the 1ST removes parametric freedom by locking production and decay modes to a single fundamental scale $Λ_0$, rendering the framework highly predictive with unique experimental signals. We demonstrate that the collider phenomenology is partitioned by the $2m_t$ kinematic threshold into di-Higgs and di-top resonance regimes. By recasting current ATLAS data, we set lower bounds on $Λ_0$ at the TeV scale and show that the High-Luminosity LHC will probe this scale up to $4$ TeV, providing a definitive test for the dynamical origin of the electroweak sector.

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arXiv2026

Photon-initiated enhancements in the pair production of highly charged coloured particles

Strong interaction is typically assumed to dominate the pair production of heavy coloured resonances at the LHC. However, mixed QCD-QED contributions from gluon-photon ($gγ$) initial states become critical for highly charged states. This contribution scales with the square of their electric charges and maximises for particles in the fundamental colour representation. We study this effect for leptoquarks, which are colour-triplet bosons. We demonstrate that tree-level mixed QCD-QED contributions enhance their pair-production rates by up to $\sim 33\%$ for a charge-$5/3$ state, rivalling the size of next-to-leading-order QCD corrections. The asymmetric colour flow of $gγ$ fusion affects the radiation pattern, altering jet multiplicities and angular distributions. By recasting the latest ATLAS $μμjj$ search data, we find that these often-overlooked QED effects systematically strengthen mass exclusion limits, establishing a necessary precision standard for bounding highly charged coloured states.

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arXiv2025

Effects of a Brueckner-Hartree-Fock-corrected effective mass on speed of sound, conformality, and observables of dark matter-admixed neutron stars

We construct an equation of state describing cold and dense matter in the core of neutron stars which includes an admixture of fermionic dark matter and incorporates nucleon effective masses derived from the relativistic Brueckner-Hartree-Fock (BHF) many-body approach within a relativistic mean-field model. Such a BHF-informed mixed-model approach increases stellar compactness, with mass-radius configurations which are consistent with smaller, lighter pulsars. The model displays the expected non-monotonic behavior of sound speed hinted at by neutron star data, and is closer to the conformal bound at maximum mass. We find that the model displays tension with bounds on heavier pulsars, suggesting that the hypothesis of an aggregated dark component in neutron stars needs further critical study.

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arXiv2025

Machine learning tagged boosted dark photon: A signature of fermionic portal matter at the LHC

We use a Hybrid Deep Neural Network (HDNN) to identify a boosted dark photon jet as a signature of a heavy vector-like fermionic portal matter (PM) connecting the visible and the dark sectors. In this work, the fermionic PM, which mixes only with the Standard Model (SM) third-generation up-type quark, predominantly decays into a top quark and a dark photon pair. The dark photon then promptly decays to a pair of standard model fermions via the gauge kinetic mixing. We have analyzed two different final states, namely, (i) exactly one tagged dark photon and exactly one tagged top quark jet, and (ii) at least two tagged dark photons and at least one tagged top quark jet at the 13 and 14 TeV LHC center of mass energies. Both these final states receive significant contributions from the pair and single production processes of the top partner. The rich event topology of the signal processes, i.e., the presence of a boosted dark photon and top quark jet pair, along with the fact that the invariant mass of the system corresponds to the mass of the top partner, help us to significantly suppress potential SM backgrounds. We have shown that one can set a $2σ$ exclusion limit of $\sim 2.3$ TeV on the top partner mass with $\sinθ_L=0.1$ and assuming $100\%$ branching ratio of the top partner in the final state with exactly one tagged dark photon and exactly one tagged top quark jet at the 14 TeV LHC center of mass energy assuming 300 fb$^{-1}$ of integrated luminosity.

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arXiv2025

Vectorlike $τ$ production through leptoquarks

Numerous phenomenological studies and collider searches have probed for the existence of new physics by looking for signatures of leptoquarks (LQs) or vectorlike leptons (VLLs). We consider a new possibility that can arise in theories with enhanced gauge symmetries: both particles are simultaneously present, and LQ-mediated processes enhance the VLL production at the LHC. We study the effect of non-standard interactions of LQs that contribute to novel production and decay signatures. We obtain the HL-LHC prospects of this framework in the mono-and di-lepton final states, and discuss other potentially relevant channels.

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arXiv2025

Fresh look at the LHC limits on vector leptoquarks

Vector leptoquarks (vLQs) are popular candidates for searching for physics beyond the Standard Model. In this paper, we present updated exclusion limits on various vLQ species, accounting for all the relevant production mechanisms at the LHC. In particular, we highlight the critical role of indirect production and its interference with the Standard Model Drell-Yan process. This interference can be constructive or destructive, depending on the specific quantum numbers of the vLQ, and significantly impacts the sensitivity of current searches. Furthermore, we demonstrate that including QCD-QED mixed pair production channels leads to a noticeable shift in model-independent mass limits. Additionally, we examine the validity of the full theory with vLQs and corresponding effective operators in the high mass regime. Overall, our analysis yields a substantial improvement in the exclusion limits on vLQs compared to the existing results in the literature.

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arXiv2025

Tagging fully hadronic exotic decays of the vectorlike $\mathbf{B}$ quark using a graph neural network

Following up on our earlier study in [J. Bardhan et al., Machine learning-enhanced search for a vectorlike singlet B quark decaying to a singlet scalar or pseudoscalar, Phys. Rev. D 107 (2023) 115001; arXiv:2212.02442], we investigate the LHC prospects of pair-produced vectorlike $B$ quarks decaying exotically to a new gauge-singlet (pseudo)scalar field $Φ$ and a $b$ quark. After the electroweak symmetry breaking, the $Φ$ decays predominantly to $gg/bb$ final states, leading to a fully hadronic $2b+4j$ or $6b$ signature. Because of the large Standard Model background and the lack of leptonic handles, it is a difficult channel to probe. To overcome the challenge, we employ a hybrid deep learning model containing a graph neural network followed by a deep neural network. We estimate that such a state-of-the-art deep learning analysis pipeline can lead to a performance comparable to that in the semi-leptonic mode, taking the discovery (exclusion) reach up to about $M_B=1.8\:(2.4)$ TeV at HL-LHC when $B$ decays fully exotically, i.e., BR$(B \to bΦ) = 100\%$.

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arXiv2025

TooLQit: Leptoquark Models and Limits

We introduce the leptoquark (LQ) toolkit, TooLQit, which includes leading-order FeynRules models for all types of LQs and a Python-based calculator, named CaLQ, to test if a set of parameter points are allowed by the LHC dilepton searches. The models include electroweak gauge interactions of the LQs and follow a set of intuitive notations. Currently, CaLQ can calculate the LHC limits on LQ ($S_1$ and $U_1$) couplings (one or more simultaneously) for any mass between $1$ and $5$ TeV using a $χ^2$ method. In this manual for TooLQit, we describe the FeynRules models and discuss the techniques used in CaLQ. We outline the workflow to check parameter spaces of LQ models with an example. We show some illustrative scans for one- and multi-coupling scenarios for the $U_1$ vector LQ. The TooLQit code is available at https://github.com/rsrchtsm/TooLQit

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arXiv2025

Vector leptoquark contributions to lepton dipole moments

Leptoquarks (LQs) can contribute to the magnetic and electric dipole moments of charged leptons, which the current experiments have measured with good accuracy. We revisit the parameter spaces of TeV-scale vector LQs that contribute to these observables and study how these models fare against the LHC bounds. We show that significant portions of the parameter space are excluded when the current LHC data is utilised effectively. We find that only $U_1$ and $V_2$ can explain the observed positive shift in $(a_μ^{\rm exp} - a_μ^{\rm SM})$ through a lepton chirality-flipping contribution with $\mathcal O(1)$ LQ-quark-lepton coupling. We also see how these two LQs can fit the electron dipole moment and atomic parity violation measurements. We find that the current electric dipole moment measurements of the muon cannot restrain the LQ-quark-lepton couplings within perturbative regions.

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arXiv2025

Right-handed neutrino production through first-generation leptoquarks

The collider phenomenology of leptoquarks (LQs) and right-handed neutrinos (RHNs) has been studied extensively in the literature. Because of the gauge singlet nature, the production of RHNs at the LHC is typically suppressed by the tiny light-heavy neutrino mixing angles. In this study, we explore a promising scenario where the presence of an LQ mediator significantly enhances RHN production. We focus on first-generation scalar and vector LQs interacting with the first-generation RHN. The prospects are better for the first-generation scenario than the other generations because of the enhanced parton distribution functions (PDFs) of first-generation quarks. The enhanced PDFs boost the production cross sections of LQs, particularly their single and indirect productions. Incorporating all production modes of LQs that result in a pair of RHNs, we estimate the discovery prospects by analysing the monoelectron and dielectron channels arising from the decay of the RHN pair. We find that the indirect production of LQs is crucial in determining the discovery reach at the HL-LHC for the first-generation scenario.

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arXiv2024

Loss function to optimise signal significance in particle physics

We construct a surrogate loss to directly optimise the significance metric used in particle physics. We evaluate our loss function for a simple event classification task using a linear model and show that it produces decision boundaries that change according to the cross sections of the processes involved. We find that the models trained with the new loss have higher signal efficiency for similar values of estimated signal significance compared to ones trained with a cross-entropy loss, showing promise to improve sensitivity of particle physics searches at colliders.

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arXiv2024

Unsupervised and lightly supervised learning in particle physics

We review the main applications of machine learning models that are not fully supervised in particle physics, i.e., clustering, anomaly detection, detector simulation, and unfolding. Unsupervised methods are ideal for anomaly detection tasks -- machine learning models can be trained on background data to identify deviations if we model the background data precisely. The learning can also be partially unsupervised when we can provide some information about the anomalies at the data level. Generative models are useful in speeding up detector simulations -- they can mimic the computationally intensive task without large resources. They can also efficiently map detector-level data to parton-level data (i.e., data unfolding). In this review, we focus on interesting ideas and connections and briefly overview the underlying techniques wherever necessary.

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arXiv2024

An economical model for $B$-flavour and $a_μ$ anomalies from SO(10) grand unification

We investigate an $\mathrm{SO}(10)$ grand unification scenario where the complex 10-dimensional scalar multiplet, containing the Standard Model (SM) Higgs boson, resides at the TeV scale altogether. The resulting low-energy model is a 2-Higgs-doublet model augmented with two $S_1$-type leptoquarks. The gauge-coupling unification is achieved with only one intermediate scale at which the Pati-Salam gauge group is broken down to the SM. Proton stability is ensured by a discrete symmetry, leftover from the breaking of the U(1)$_{\mathrm{PQ}}$ global symmetry. The axion corresponding to this broken U(1)$_{\mathrm{PQ}}$ provides a solution to the strong CP problem, and also serves as an important dark matter candidate. We discuss how the simultaneous explanation for the $R_{D^{(*)}}$ and $a_μ$ anomalies comes about in the model, and investigate some of its phenomenological implications.

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arXiv2024

Fresh look at the LHC limits on scalar leptoquarks

The scalar-leptoquark (sLQ) parameter space is well explored experimentally. The direct pair production searches at the LHC have excluded light sLQs almost model agnostically, and the high-$p_{\rm T}$ dilepton tail data have put strong bounds on the leptoquark-quark-lepton Yukawa couplings for a wide range of sLQ masses. However, these do not show the complete picture. Previously, Mandal \emph{et al.} [Single productions of colored particles at the LHC: An example with scalar leptoquarks, \href{https://doi.org/10.1007/JHEP07(2015)028}{J. High Energy Phys. 07 (2015) 028}] showed how the dilepton-dijet data from the pair production searches could give strong limits on these couplings. This was possible by including the single-production contribution to the dilepton-dijet signal. In this paper, we take a fresh look at the LHC limits on all sLQs by following the same principle and combine all significant contributions -- from pair and single productions, $t$-channel sLQ exchange and its interference with the Standard Model background -- to the $μμjj$ final state and recast the limits. We notice that the sLQ exchange and its interference with the background processes play significant roles in the limits. The $μμjj$-recast limits are comparable to or, in some cases, significantly better than the currently known limits (from high-$p_{\rm T}$ dilepton data and direct searches), i.e., the LHC data rules out more parameter space than what is considered in the current literature. For the first time, we also show how including the QED processes can noticeably improve the sLQ mass exclusion limits from the QCD-only limits.

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arXiv2024

Right-handed neutrino pair production via second-generation leptoquarks

No direct experimental constraints exist on Leptoquark (LQ) couplings with quarks and right-handed neutrinos (RHNs). If a LQ dominantly couples to RHNs, it can leave unique signatures at the LHC. The RHNs can be produced copiously from LQ decays as long as they are lighter than the LQs. LQ-induced RHN production has never been searched for in experiments. This channel can act as a simultaneous probe for RHNs and LQs that dominantly couple to RHNs. In this paper, we consider all possible charge-$2/3$ and $1/3$ scalar and vector LQs that dominantly couple to second-generation quarks and RHN. We study the pair and single productions of TeV-scale LQs and their subsequent decay to sub-TeV RHNs, realised in the inverse seesaw framework. We also consider RHN pair production through a $t$-channel LQ exchange. The single LQ production and $t$-channel contributions can be significant for large LQ-RHN-quark couplings. We systematically combine events from these processes leading to a pair of RHNs plus jets to study the prospects of LQ-assisted RHN pair production. We analyse the monolepton and opposite-sign dilepton final states and estimate the discovery reach at the high-luminosity LHC.

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arXiv2024

Pinning down the leptophobic $Z^\prime$ in leptonic final states with Deep Learning

A leptophobic $Z^\prime$ that does not couple with the Standard Model leptons can evade the stringent bounds from the dilepton-resonance searches. In our earlier paper [T. Arun et al., Search for the $Z'$ boson decaying to a right-handed neutrino pair in leptophobic $U(1)$ models, Phys. Rev. D, 106 (2022) 095035; arXiv:2204.02949], we presented two gauge anomaly-free $U(1)$ models -- one based on the Green-Schwarz (GS) anomaly cancellation mechanism, and the other on a grand unified theory (GUT) framework with gauge kinetic mixing -- where a heavy leptophobic $Z'$ is present along with right-handed neutrinos ($N_R$). We pointed out the interesting possibility of a correlated search for $Z'$ and $N_R$ at the LHC through the $pp\to Z'\to N_R N_R$ channel. This channel can probe a part of the $Z'$ parameter space beyond the reach of the standard dijet resonance searches. In this follow-up paper, we analyse the challenging monolepton final state arising from the decays of the $N_R$ pair with Deep Learning. We present the high-luminosity LHC discovery reaches for six different GUT embeddings and a benchmark point in the GS setup. We also update our previous estimates in the dilepton channel with Deep Learning. We identify parameter regions that can be probed with the proposed channel but will remain inaccessible to dijet searches at the HL-LHC.

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