Kevin S. Croker, Michael J. Zevin, Duncan Farrah, Kurtis A. Nishimura, Gregory Tarle

We demonstrate a single-parameter route for reproducing higher mass objects as observed in the LIGO--Virgo mass distribution, using only the isolated binary stellar evolution channel. This single parameter encodes the cosmological mass growth of compact stellar remnants that exceed the Tolman-Oppenheimer-Volkoff limit. Cosmological mass growth appears in known solutions to General Relativity with cosmological boundary conditions. We consider the possibility of solutions with cosmological boundary conditions, which reduce to Kerr on timescales short compared to the Hubble time. We discuss complementary observational signatures of these solutions that can confirm or invalidate their astrophysical relevance.

Adam Kardos, Sven-Olaf Moch, German Rodrigo

Our ordinary life changed quite a bit in March of 2020 due to the global Covid-19 pandemic. While spring time in general well awaited and regarded as a synonym for rejuvenation the spring of 2020 brought lock-down, curfew, home office and digital education to the lives of many. The particle physics community was not an exception: research institutes and universities introduced home office and digital lecturing and all workshops, conferences and summer schools were canceled, got postponed or took place online. Using publicly available data from the INSPIRE and arXiv databases we investigate the effects of this dramatic change of life to the publishing trends of the high-energy physics community with an emphasis on particle phenomenology and theory. To get insights we gather information about publishing trends in the last 20 years, and analyse it in detail.

Edward Witten

For various reasons, it seems necessary to include complex saddle points in the "Euclidean" path integral of General Relativity. But some sort of restriction on the allowed complex saddle points is needed to avoid various unphysical examples. In this article, a speculative proposal is made concerning a possible restriction on the allowed saddle points in the gravitational path integral. The proposal is motivated by recent work of Kontsevich and Segal on complex metrics in quantum field theory, and earlier work of Louko and Sorkin on topology change from a real time point of view.