We consider axially symmetric, rotating boson stars. Their flat space limits represent spinning Q-balls. We discuss their properties and determine their domain of existence. Q-balls and boson stars are stationary solutions and exist only in a limited frequency range. The coupling to gravity gives rise to a spiral-like frequency dependence of the boson stars. We address the flat space limit and the limit of strong gravitational coupling. For comparison we also determine the properties of spherically symmetric Q-balls and boson stars.

The LIGO/Virgo collaboration published the catalogs GWTC-1, GWTC-2.1 and GWTC-3 containing candidate gravitational-wave (GW) events detected during its runs O1, O2 and O3. These GW events can be possible sites of neutrino emission. In this paper, we present a search for neutrino counterparts of 90 GW candidates using IceCube DeepCore, the low-energy infill array of the IceCube Neutrino Observatory. The search is conducted using an unbinned maximum likelihood method, within a time window of 1000 s and uses the spatial and timing information from the GW events. The neutrinos used for the search have energies ranging from a few GeV to several tens of TeV. We do not find any significant emission of neutrinos, and place upper limits on the flux and the isotropic-equivalent energy emitted in low-energy neutrinos. We also conduct a binomial test to search for source populations potentially contributing to neutrino emission. We report a non-detection of a significant neutrino-source population with this test.

We construct traversable wormholes in dilatonic Einstein-Gauss-Bonnet theory in four spacetime dimensions, without needing any form of exotic matter. We determine their domain of existence, and show that these wormholes satisfy a generalised Smarr relation. We demonstrate linear stability with respect to radial perturbations for a subset of these wormholes.

Quasinormal modes are excited during the ringdown phase of black holes after merger. Determination of quasinormal modes of rapidly rotating black holes in alternative theories of gravity has remained a challenge for a long time. Here we discuss in detail our recently developed method to extract the quasinormal modes for rapidly rotating black holes in Einstein-Gauss-Bonnet-dilaton theory. We first obtain numerically the exact rapidly rotating background solutions, which also clarify their domain of existence. Then we solve the equations for the linear perturbations of the metric and the dilaton field by employing an appropriate set of boundary conditions and a spectral decomposition of the perturbation functions. The resulting spectrum agrees well with the known limits obtained for slow rotation and weak coupling, while it exhibits larger deviations for stronger coupling.

We construct a specific example of a class of traversable wormholes in Einstein-Dirac-Maxwell theory in four spacetime dimensions, without needing any form of exotic matter. Restricting to a model with two massive fermions in a singlet spinor state, we show the existence of spherically symmetric asymptotically flat configurations which are free of singularities, representing localized states. These solutions satisfy a generalized Smarr relation, being connected with the extremal Reissner-Nordstr\"om black holes. They also possess a finite mass $M$ and electric charge $Q_e$, with $Q_e/M>1$. An exact wormhole solution with ungauged, massless fermions is also reported.

We present for the first time solutions in the gauged $U(1)\times U(1)$ model of Witten describing vortons -- spinning flux loops stabilized against contraction by the centrifugal force. Vortons were heuristically described many years ago, however, the corresponding field theory solutions were not obtained and so the stability issue remained open. We construct explicitly a family of stationary vortons characterized by their charge and angular momentum. Most of them are unstable and break in pieces when perturbed. However, thick vortons with small radius preserve their form in the 3+1 non-linear dynamical evolution. This gives the first ever evidence of stable vortons and impacts several branches of physics where they could potentially exist. These range from cosmology, since vortons could perhaps contribute to dark matter, to QCD and condensed matter physics.

We study axial quasinormal modes of static neutron stars in the nonminimal derivative coupling sector of Horndeski theory. We focus on the fundamental curvature mode, which we analyse for ten different equations of state with different matter content. A comparison with the results obtained in pure General Relativity reveals that, apart from modifying the spectrum of the frequencies and the damping times of the stars, this theory modifies several universal relations between the modes and physical parameters of the stars, that are otherwise matter-independent.

We present a database of acoustic transfer functions of the Hearpiece, an openly available multi-microphone multi-driver in-the-ear earpiece for hearing device research. The database includes HRTFs for 87 incidence directions as well as responses of the drivers, all measured at the four microphones of the Hearpiece as well as the eardrum in the occluded and open ear. The transfer functions were measured in both ears of 25 human subjects and a KEMAR with anthropometric pinnae for five reinsertions of the device. We describe the measurements of the database and analyse derived acoustic parameters of the device. All regarded transfer functions are subject to differences between subjects as well as variations due to reinsertion into the same ear. Also, the results show that KEMAR measurements represent a median human ear well for all assessed transfer functions. The database is a rich basis for development, evaluation and robustness analysis of multiple hearing device algorithms and applications. The database is openly available at this https URL

We construct rotating black holes in Einstein-scalar-Gauss-Bonnet theory with a quadratic coupling function. We map the domain of existence of the rotating fundamental solutions, we construct radially excited rotating black holes (including their existence lines), and we show that there are angularly excited rotating black holes. The bifurcation points of the radially and angularly excited solutions branching out of the Schwarzschild solution follow a regular pattern.

We discuss the properties of Lorentzian wormholes in dilatonic Einstein-Gauss-Bonnet theory in four spacetime dimensions. These wormholes do not need any form of exotic matter for their existence. A subset of these wormholes is shown to be linearly stable with respect to radial perturbations. We perform a comprehensive study of their domain of existence, and derive a generalised Smarr relation for these wormholes. We also investigate their geodesics determining all possible particle trajectories, and perform a study of the acceleration and tidal forces that a traveler crossing the wormhole would feel.

We study the optical appearance and the apparent radiation flux of a thin accretion disk around the static Janis-Newman-Winicour naked singularity. We confine ourselves to the astrophysically most relevant case, when the solution possesses a photon sphere, assuming that the radiation emitted by the disk is described by the Novikov-Thorne model. The observable images resemble closely the visual appearance of the Schwarzschild black hole, as only quantitative differences are present. For the Janis-Newman-Winicour solution the accretion disk appears smaller, and its emission is characterized by a higher peak of the radiation flux. In addition, the most significant part of the radiation is concentrated in a closer neighbourhood of the flux maximum. The results are obtained independently by two alternative methods, consisting of a semi-analytical scheme using the spherical symmetry of the spacetime, and a fully numerical ray-tracing procedure valid for any stationary and axisymmetric spacetime.

It is shown that if a metric in quantum gravity can be decomposed as a sum of classical and quantum parts then Einstein quantum gravity looks approximately like modified gravity with a nonminimal interaction between gravity and matter.

We present for the first time solutions in the gauged $U(1)\times U(1)$ model of Witten describing vortons -- spinning flux loops stabilized against contraction by the centrifugal force. Vortons were heuristically described many years ago, however, the corresponding field theory solutions were not obtained and so the stability issue remained open. We construct explicitly a family of stationary vortons characterized by their charge and angular momentum. Most of them are unstable and break in pieces when perturbed. However, thick vortons with small radius preserve their form in the 3+1 non-linear dynamical evolution. This gives the first ever evidence of stable vortons and impacts several branches of physics where they could potentially exist. These range from cosmology, since vortons could perhaps contribute to dark matter, to QCD and condensed matter physics.

The probability distribution of the maximum $M_t$ of a single resetting Brownian motion (RBM) of duration $t$ and resetting rate $r$, properly centred and scaled, is known to converge to the standard Gumbel distribution of the classical extreme value theory. This Gumbel law describes the typical fluctuations of $M_t$ around its average $\sim \ln (r t)$ for large $t$ on a scale of $O(1)$. Here we compute the large-deviation tails of this distribution when $M_t = O(t)$ and show that the large-deviation function has a singularity where the second derivative is discontinuous, signalling a dynamical phase transition. Then we consider a collection of independent RBMs with initial (and resetting) positions uniformly distributed with a density $\rho$ over the negative half-line. We show that the fluctuations in the initial positions of the particles modify the distribution of $M_t$. The average over the initial conditions can be performed in two different ways, in analogy with disordered systems: (i) the annealed case where one averages over all possible initial conditions and (ii) the quenched case where one considers only the contributions coming from typical initial configurations. We show that in the annealed case, the limiting distribution of the maximum is characterized by a new scaling function, different from the Gumbel law but the large-deviation function remains the same as in the single particle case. In contrast, for the quenched case, the limiting (typical) distribution remains Gumbel but the large-deviation behaviors are new and nontrivial. Our analytical results, both for the typical as well as for the large-deviation regime of $M_t$, are verified numerically with extremely high precision, down to $10^{-250}$ for the probability density of $M_t$.

We consider three global characteristic times for a one-dimensional Brownian motion $x(\tau)$ in the interval $\tau\in [0,t]$: the occupation time $t_{\rm o}$denoting the cumulative time where$x(\tau)>0$, the time$t_{\rm m}$ at which the process achieves its global maximum in $[0,t]$ and the last-passage time $t_l$ through the origin before $t$. All three random variables have the same marginal distribution given by L\'evy's arcsine law. We compute exactly the pairwise joint distributions of these three times and show that they are quite different from each other. The joint distributions display rather rich and nontrivial correlations between these times. Our analytical results are verified by numerical simulations.

Black holes in 5-dimensional Einstein-Maxwell-Chern-Simons (EMCS) theory and their intriguing properties are discussed. For the special case of the CS coupling constant $\lambda=\lambda_{SG}$, as obtained from supergravity, a closed form solution is known for the rotating black holes. Beyond this supergravity value, the EMCS black hole solutions can e.g. exhibit nonuniqueness and form sequences of radially excited solutions. In the presence of a negative cosmological constant the black holes can possess an extra-parameter corresponding to a magnetic flux in addition to the mass, electric charge and angular momenta. This latter family of black holes possesses also a solitonic limit. Finally, a new class of squashed EMCS black hole solutions is discussed.

We employ a recently developed spectral method to obtain the spectrum of quasinormal modes of rapidly rotating black holes in alternative theories of gravity and apply it to the black holes of shift-symmetric Einstein-scalar-Gauss-Bonnet theory. In this theory the quasinormal modes were recently obtained by employing perturbation theory in quadratic order in the Gauss-Bonnet coupling constant. Here we present the full non-perturbative results for the spectrum within the domain of existence of rotating black holes and compare with the perturbative results. We also compare with the quasinormal mode spectrum of rapidly rotating Einstein-dilaton-Gauss-Bonnet black holes.

In this work we consider information-theoretical observables to analyze short symbolic sequences, comprising time-series that represent the orientation of a single spin in a $2D$ Ising ferromagnet on a square lattice of size $L^2=128^2$, for different system temperatures $T$. The latter were chosen from an interval enclosing the critical point $T_{\rm c}$ of the model. At small temperatures the sequences are thus very regular, at high temperatures they are maximally random. In the vicinity of the critical point, nontrivial, long-range correlations appear. Here, we implement estimators for the entropy rate, excess entropy (i.e. "complexity") and multi-information. First, we implement a Lempel-Ziv string parsing scheme, providing seemingly elaborate entropy rate and multi-information estimates and an approximate estimator for the excess entropy. Furthermore, we apply easy-to-use black-box data compression utilities, providing approximate estimators only. For comparison and to yield results for benchmarking purposes we implement the information-theoretic observables also based on the well-established M-block Shannon entropy, which is more tedious to apply compared to the the first two "algorithmic" entropy estimation procedures. To test how well one can exploit the potential of such data compression techniques, we aim at detecting the critical point of the $2D$ Ising ferromagnet. Among the above observables, the multi-information, which is known to exhibit an isolated peak at the critical point, is very easy to replicate by means of both efficient algorithmic entropy estimation procedures. Finally, we assess how good the various algorithmic entropy estimates compare to the more conventional block entropy estimates and illustrate a simple modification that yields enhanced results.