Marco Nardecchia

A bstract: We study light spin-1 gauge bosons coupled to electroweak-anomalous currents. For generic charge assignments, anomaly cancellation requires new fermions (anomalons) that are chiral under the new abelian symmetry and carry electroweak charges. If their masses arise from the breaking of the new gauge symmetry, integrating them out generates Wess-Zumino interactions fixed by mixed-anomaly matching, providing the infrared description of the theory. We classify minimal anomalon spectra, derive the corresponding effective interactions, and combine experimental constraints with finite-naturalness considerations to bound the UV completion scale. Motivated by recent NA62 and Belle II results, we then develop a unified phenomenological framework for the missing-energy signatures of these anomalous light vectors, focusing on scenarios where the new vector decays predominantly into neutrinos so that the leading probes are rare processes with invisible final states. As applications, we survey current and projected searches across flavour and electroweak observables, including K → πE _miss , B → K ^(*) E _miss , and Z → γE _miss , and discuss their interplay with direct searches for anomalons.

We consider a class of theories with a U ( 1 ) X gauge symmetry associated with leptonic chiral currents. The low-energy effective field theory includes a light spin-1 boson coupled to the electroweak gauge sector via a Wess-Zumino term, which ensures anomaly cancellation in the infrared. As a concrete application, we show that a light vector boson with mass m X ≃ 2.1 GeV , coupled to a τ -lepton chiral current, can readily account for the recent 3 σ excess observed in B → K ( * ) E miss at Belle II, while remaining consistent with existing constraints from Z → γ E miss and direct searches for anomalon fields responsible for anomaly cancellation in the ultraviolet. After classifying phenomenologically viable models, we explore in greater detail two concrete realizations which give rise to distinctive phenomenological signatures, potentially accessible at future experiments at the high-energy and intensity frontiers.

Recent experimental results from the Atomki collaboration have reported the observation of anomalous effects in Beryllium, Helium and Carbon nuclear transitions that could hint at physics beyond the Standard Model. However, the MEG-II experiment has recently found no significant anomalous signal in the Beryllium transition ⁸Be^⋆ → ⁸Be + e ⁺ e ⁻. In view of this result, we critically re-examine the possible theoretical interpretations of the anomalies observed by the Atomki experiment in terms of a new boson X with mass around 17 MeV. The present work aims to study the phenomenology of a spin-2 state and revisit the possibility of a pure CP-even scalar, which was initially dismissed due to its inability to explain the Beryllium anomalous signal. Our analysis shows that a spin-2 state is highly disfavoured by the SINDRUM constraint while a scalar boson could explain the Helium and Carbon anomalies while being compatible with other experimental constraints.

A muon collider would enable the big jump ahead in energy reach that is needed for a fruitful exploration of fundamental interactions. The challenges of producing muon collisions at high luminosity and 10 TeV centre of mass energy are being investigated by the recently-formed International Muon Collider Collaboration. This Review summarises the status and the recent advances on muon colliders design, physics and detector studies. The aim is to provide a global perspective of the field and to outline directions for future work.

We study perturbative unitarity constraints on generic interactions between fermion and vector fields, which are allowed to have generic quantum numbers under a Π_iSU(N_i) ⨂ U(1) group. We derive compact expressions for the bounds on the couplings for the cases where the fields transform under the trivial, fundamental or adjoint representation of the various, considering both the case of a complex vector arbitrary interactions with fermionic current and also the case of vectors arising as gauge fields. We apply our results to some specific NP models showing the constraints that can be derived using the tool of perturbative unitarity.

We study perturbative unitarity constraints on generic Yukawa interactions where the involved fields have arbitrary quantum numbers under an ∏_iSU(N_i) ⊗ U(1) group. We derive compact expressions for the bounds on the Yukawa couplings for the cases where the fields transform under the trivial, fundamental or adjoint representation of the various SU(N) factors. We apply our results to specific models formulated to explain the anomalous measurements of (g − 2)_μ and of the charged- and neutral-current decays of the B mesons. We show that, while these models can generally still explain the observed experimental values, the required Yukawa couplings are pushed at the edge of the perturbative regime.