In this article we consider the presence of neutrino non-standard interactions (NSI) in the production and detection processes of reactor antineutrinos at the Daya Bay experiment. We report for the first time, the new constraints on the flavor non-universal and flavor universal charged-current NSI parameters, estimated using the currently released 621 days of Daya Bay data. New limits are placed assuming that the new physics effects are just inverse of each other in the production and detection processes. With this special choice of the NSI parameters, we observe a shift in the oscillation amplitude without distorting the L/E pattern of the oscillation probability. This shift in the depth of the oscillation dip can be caused by the NSI parameters as well as by θ 13 , making it quite difficult to disentangle the NSI effects from the standard oscillations. We explore the correlations between the NSI parameters and θ 13 that may lead to significant deviations in the reported value of the reactor mixing angle with the help of iso-probability surface plots. Finally, we present the limits on electron, muon/tau, and flavor universal (FU) NSI couplings with and without considering the uncertainty in the normalization of the total event rates. Assuming a perfect knowledge of the event rates normalization, we find strong upper bounds ∼ 0.1% for the electron and FU cases improving the present limits by one order of magnitude. However, for a conservative error of 5% in the total normalization, these constraints are relaxed by almost one order of magnitude.

We show that density fluctuations during phase transitions in pulsar cores may have non-trivial effects on pulsar timings, and may also possibly account for glitches and anti-glitches. These density fluctuations invariably lead to non-zero off-diagonal components of the moment of inertia, leading to transient wobbling of star. Thus, accurate measurements of pulsar timing and intensity modulations (from wobbling) may be used to identify the specific pattern of density fluctuations, hence the particular phase transition, occurring inside the pulsar core. Changes in quadrupole moment from rapidly evolving density fluctuations during the transition, with very short time scales, may provide a new source for gravitational waves.

Reaction-diffusion equations with suitable boundary conditions have special propagating solutions which very closely resemble the moving interfaces in a first order transition. We show that the dynamics of chiral order parameter for chiral symmetry breaking transition in heavy-ion collisions, with dissipative dynamics, is governed by one such equation, specifically, the Newell-Whitehead equation. Further, required boundary conditions are automatically satisfied due to the geometry of the collision. The chiral transition is, therefore, completed by a propagating interface, exactly as for a first order transition, even though the transition actually is a crossover for relativistic heavyion collisions. Same thing also happens when we consider the initial confinement-deconfinement transition with Polyakov loop order parameter. The resulting equation, again with dissipative dynamics, can then be identified with the reaction-diffusion equation known as the Fitzhugh-Nagumo equation which is used in population genetics. We discuss the implications of these results for heavyion collisions. We also discuss possible extensions for the case of early universe.

In this article we have investigated the effects of strong magnetic field on the properties of quarkonia immersed in a thermal medium of quarks and gluons and studied its quasi-free dissociation due to the Landau-damping. Thermalizing the Schwinger propagator in the lowest Landau levels for quarks and the Feynman propagator for gluons in real-time formalism, we have calculated the resummed retarded and symmetric propagators, which in turn give the real and imaginary components of dielectric permittivity, respectively. Thus the effect of a strongly magnetized hot QCD medium have been encrypted into the real and imaginary parts of heavy quark interaction in medium, respectively. The magnetic field affects the large-distance interaction more than the short-distance interaction, as a result, the real part of potential becomes more attractive and the magnitude of imaginary part too becomes larger, compared to the thermal medium in absence of strong magnetic field. As a consequence the average size of J/ψ's and ψ ′ 's are increased but χ c 's get shrunk. Similarly the magnetic field affects the binding of J/ψ's and χ c 's discriminately, i.e. it decreases the binding of J/ψ and increases for χ c . However, the further increase in magnetic field results in the decrease of binding energies. On contrary the magnetic field increases the width of the resonances, unless the temperature is sufficiently high. We have finally studied how the presence of magnetic field affects the dissolution of quarkonia in a thermal medium due to the Landau damping, where the dissociation temperatures are found to increase compared to the thermal medium in absence of magnetic field. However, further increase of magnetic field decreases the dissociation temperatures. For example, J/ψ's and χ c 's are dissociated at higher 1 hasan.dph2014@iitr.ac.in 2 binoyfph@iitr.ac.in 3 bhaswar.mph2016@iitr.ac.in 4 p.bagchi@vecc.gov.in 1 temperatures at 2 T c and 1.1 T c at a magnetic field eB ≈ 6 and 4 m 2 π , respectively, compared to the values 1.60 T c and 0.8 T c in the absence of magnetic field, respectively.

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