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We present a comprehensive photometric and spectroscopic study of the Type IIP SN 2018is. The $V$-band luminosity and the expansion velocity at 50 days post-explosion are $-$15.1$\pm$0.2 mag (corrected for A$_V$=1.34 mag) and 1400 km s$^{-1}$, classifying it as a low-luminosity SN II. The recombination phase in the $V$-band is shorter, lasting around 110 days, and exhibits a steeper decline (1.0 mag per 100 days) compared to most other low-luminosity SNe II. Additionally, the optical and near-infrared spectra display hydrogen emission lines that are strikingly narrow, even for this class. The Fe II and Sc II line velocities are at the lower end of the typical range for low-luminosity SNe II. Semi-analytical modelling of the bolometric light curve suggests an ejecta mass of $\sim$8 M$_\odot$, corresponding to a pre-supernova mass of $\sim$9.5 M$_\odot$, and an explosion energy of $\sim$0.40 $\times$ 10$^{51}$ erg. Hydrodynamical modelling further indicates that the progenitor had a zero-age main sequence mass of 9 M$_\odot$, coupled with a low explosion energy of 0.19 $\times$ 10$^{51}$ erg. The nebular spectrum reveals weak [O I] $\lambda\lambda$6300,6364 lines, consistent with a moderate-mass progenitor, while features typical of Fe core-collapse events, such as He I, [C I], and [Fe I], are indiscernible. However, the redder colours and low ratio of Ni to Fe abundance do not support an electron-capture scenario either. As a low-luminosity SN II with an atypically steep decline during the photospheric phase and remarkably narrow emission lines, SN 2018is contributes to the diversity observed within this population., Comment: 25 pages, 21 figures, accepted for publication in A&A

The Stochastic Burgers Equation (SBE) is a singular, non-linear Stochastic Partial Differential Equation (SPDE) that describes, on mesoscopic scales, the fluctuations of stochastic driven diffusive systems with a conserved scalar quantity. In space dimension d = 2, the SBE is critical, being formally scale invariant under diffusive scaling. As such, it falls outside of the domain of applicability of the theories of Regularity Structures and paracontrolled calculus. In apparent contrast with the formal scale invariance, we fully prove the conjecture first appeared in [H. van Beijeren, R. Kutner, & H. Spohn, Phys. Rev. Lett., 1986] according to which the 2d-SBE is logarithmically superdiffusive, i.e. its diffusion coefficient diverges like $(\log t)^{2/3}$ as $t\to\infty$, thus removing subleading diverging multiplicative corrections in [D. De Gaspari & L. Haunschmid-Sibitz, Electron. J. Probab., 2024] and in [H.-T. Yau, Ann. of Math., 2004] for 2d-ASEP. We precisely identify the constant prefactor of the logarithm and show it is proportional to $\lambda^{4/3}$, for $\lambda>0$ the coupling constant, which, intriguingly, turns out to be exactly the same as for the one-dimensional Stochastic Burgers/KPZ equation. More importantly, we prove that, under super-diffusive space-time rescaling, the SBE has an explicit Gaussian fixed point in the Renormalization Group sense, by deriving a superdiffusive central limit-type theorem for its solution. This is the first scaling limit result for a critical singular SPDE, beyond the weak coupling regime, and is obtained via a refined control, on all length-scales, of the resolvent of the generator of the SBE. We believe our methods are well-suited to study other out-of-equilibrium driven diffusive systems at the critical dimension, such as 2d-ASEP, which, we conjecture, have the same large-scale Fixed Point as SBE.

Many motivated extensions of the standard model include new light bosons, such as axions and dark photons, which can mix with the ordinary photon. This latter, when in a dilute plasma, can be dressed by an effective plasma mass. If this is equal to the mass of the new degree of freedom, then a resonance takes place and the probability of transition between states is enhanced. This phenomenon of resonance conversion is at the very basis of multiple probes of dark matter, and it is typically studied within the so-called Landau-Zener approximation for level crossings. This latter is known to break down in a variety of scenarios, such as multiple level crossings or when the de Broglie wave length of the new boson is comparable to the scale over which the background plasma varies. We develop a flexible code adopting a 3+1 formalism in flat spacetime to perform non-linear simulations of systems with photons and new ultralight bosons in the presence of plasma. Our code currently allows to evolve one-dimensional systems, which are the ones of interest for this first study, but can be easily extended to treat three-dimensional spaces, and can be adapted to describe a plethora of realistic astrophysical and cosmological situations. Here we use it to study the breakdown of the Landau-Zener approximation in the case of multiple level crossings and when the slowly-varying plasma approximation ceases to be valid. In this first paper we detail our code and use it to study non-turbulent plasma, where small scale fluctuations can be neglected; their treatment will be considered in an upcoming publication., Comment: 16 pages, 13 figures

The tidal Love numbers of self-gravitating compact objects describe their response to external tidal perturbations, such as those from a companion in a binary system, offering valuable insights into their internal structure. For static tidal fields, asymptotically flat black holes in vacuum exhibit vanishing Love numbers in general relativity, even though this property is sensitive to the presence of an external environment. In this work we study the tidal deformability of black holes surrounded by thin accretion disks, showing that the Love numbers could be large enough to mask any effect of modified gravity and to intrinsically limit tidal tests of black-hole mimickers. Furthermore, we investigate the measurability of the tidal parameters with next-generation gravitational wave experiments, like LISA and Einstein Telescope. Our findings suggest that these parameters could be measured with high precision, providing a powerful tool to probe the environment around coalescing binary systems., Comment: 14 pages, 5 figures. v2: matching version published in PRD

Mixing between ultralight bosons and the Standard Model photon may allow access to the hitherto invisible Universe. In the presence of plasma, photons are dressed with an effective mass which will influence the conversion between the two. We study this phenomenon, known as in-medium suppression, in the context of black hole physics. We consider both axion-photon mixing around charged black holes and dark photon-photon mixing around neutral black holes. We find that the presence of plasma indeed influences the conversion rate, possibly quenching it altogether for large plasma densities, and discuss implications for superradiance and observational signatures., Comment: 12 pages, 5 figures, v2: extra figure, typos corrected; version to appear in Physical Review D

Our universe is permeated with interstellar plasma, which prevents propagation of low-frequency electromagnetic waves. Here, we show that two dramatic consequences arise out of such suppression; (i) if plasma permeates the light ring of a black hole, electromagnetic modes are screened entirely from the gravitational-wave signal, changing the black hole spectroscopy paradigm; (ii) if a near vacuum cavity is formed close to a charged black hole, as expected for near equal-mass mergers, ringdown "echoes" are excited. The amplitude of such echoes decays slowly and could thus serve as a silver bullet for plasmas near charged black holes., Comment: 11 pages, 5 figures, version to appear in Physical Review D Letters

The goal of these lecture notes is to present recent results regarding the large-scale behaviour of critical and super-critical non-linear stochastic PDEs, that fall outside the realm of the theory of Regularity Structures. These include the two-dimensional Anisotropic KPZ equation, the stochastic Burgers equation in dimension $d\ge 2$ and the stochastic Navier-Stokes equation with divergence-free noise in dimension $d=2$. Rather than providing complete proofs, we try to emphasise the main ideas, and some crucial aspects of our approach: the role of the generator equation and of the Fluctuation-Dissipation Theorem to identify the limit process; Wiener chaos decomposition with respect to the stationary measure and its truncation; and the so-called Replacement Lemma, which controls the weak coupling limit of the equations in the critical dimension and identifies the limiting diffusivity. For pedagogical reasons, we will focus exclusively on the stochastic Burgers equation. The notes are based on works in collaboration with Dirk Erhard and Massimiliano Gubinelli., Comment: 70 pages. Notes for the lecture series "Large-scale behavior of (super)-critical stochastic PDEs'' by F. Toninelli, CIME summer school "Statistical Mechanics and Stochastic PDEs'', Cetraro (Italy), 2023. arXiv admin note: text overlap with arXiv:2304.05730

Robot object manipulation in real-world environments is challenging because robot operation must be robust to a range of sensing, estimation, and actuation uncertainties to avoid potentially unsafe and costly mistakes that are a barrier to their adoption. In this paper, we propose a flexible and generalisable physics-informed causal Bayesian network (CBN) based framework for a robot to probabilistically reason about candidate manipulation actions, to enable robot decision-making robust to arbitrary robot system uncertainties -- the first of its kind to use a probabilistic programming language implementation. Using experiments in high-fidelity Gazebo simulation of an exemplar block stacking task, we demonstrate our framework's ability to: (1) predict manipulation outcomes with high accuracy (Pred Acc: 88.6%); and, (2) perform greedy next-best action selection with 94.2% task success rate. We also demonstrate our framework's suitability for real-world robot systems with a domestic robot. Thus, we show that by combining probabilistic causal modelling with physics simulations, we can make robot manipulation more robust to system uncertainties and hence more feasible for real-world applications. Further, our generalised reasoning framework can be used and extended for future robotics and causality research., Comment: 7 pages, 7 figures, submitted to the 2025 IEEE Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA 2025)

We investigate the large-scale behaviour of the Self-Repelling Brownian Polymer (SRBP) in the critical dimension $d=2$. The SRBP is a model of self-repelling motion, which is formally given by the solution a stochastic differential equation driven by a standard Brownian motion and with a drift given by the negative gradient of its own local time. As with its discrete counterpart, the "true" self-avoiding walk (TSAW) of [D.J. Amit, G. Parisi, & L. Peliti, Asymptotic behaviour of the "true" self-avoiding walk, Phys. Rev. B, 1983], it is conjectured to be logarithmically superdiffusive, i.e. to be such that its mean-square displacement grows as $t(\log t)^\beta$ for $t$ large and some currently unknown $\beta\in(0,1)$. The main result of the paper is an invariance principle for the SRBP under the weak coupling scaling, which corresponds to scaling the SRBP diffusively and simultaneously tuning down the strength of the self-interaction in a scale-dependent way. The diffusivity for the limiting Brownian motion is explicit and its expression provides compelling evidence that the $\beta$ above should be $1/2$. Further, we derive the scaling limit of the so-called environment seen by the particle process, which formally solves a non-linear singular stochastic PDE of transport-type, and prove this is given by the solution of a stochastic linear transport equation with enhanced diffusivity.

Even if globally neutral, in various scenarios compact objects can have a nonvanishing dipole moment. Examples include neutron stars with magnetic dipoles, black-hole microstates in the string-theory fuzzball scenario, and classical black holes in modified theories of gravity with spin-induced scalarization or Lorentz-violating terms. A fundamental dipole moment would give rise to rich phenomenology, for example to intrinsic precession and extra emission channels in binary systems. We show that extreme mass-ratio inspirals (EMRIs) detectable by future gravitational-wave interferometers allow us to study a fundamental dipole on the secondary object in a model-agnostic fashion. By developing a general model for a fundamental scalar dipole, we compute the extra flux associated with it. This effect is suppressed by the square of the mass ratio relative to the case of fundamental charges, making its detection with EMRIs very challenging for the typical dipole moments predicted in various models. On the other hand, for the same reason the impact of an extra dipole for constraints on extra fundamental charges is likely negligible, making the latter constraints more robust., Comment: 10 pages, 5 figures

We develop a relativistic perturbation theory for scalar clouds around rotating black holes. We first introduce a relativistic product and corresponding orthogonality relation between modes, extending a recent result for gravitational perturbations. We then derive the analog of time-dependent perturbation theory in quantum mechanics, and apply it to calculate self-gravitational frequency shifts. This approach supersedes the non-relativistic "gravitational atom" approximation, brings close agreement with numerical relativity, and has practical applications for gravitational-wave astronomy., Comment: 7+4 pages, 2+1 figures. v2: improved derivation of the main result, including two new appendices, and other minor changes. matches version accepted for publication in PRL

Causal modelling offers great potential to provide autonomous agents the ability to understand the data-generation process that governs their interactions with the world. Such models capture formal knowledge as well as probabilistic representations of noise and uncertainty typically encountered by autonomous robots in real-world environments. Thus, causality can aid autonomous agents in making decisions and explaining outcomes, but deploying causality in such a manner introduces new challenges. Here we identify challenges relating to causality in the context of a drone system operating in a salt mine. Such environments are challenging for autonomous agents because of the presence of confounders, non-stationarity, and a difficulty in building complete causal models ahead of time. To address these issues, we propose a probabilistic causal framework consisting of: causally-informed POMDP planning, online SCM adaptation, and post-hoc counterfactual explanations. Further, we outline planned experimentation to evaluate the framework integrated with a drone system in simulated mine environments and on a real-world mine dataset., Comment: 3 Pages, 3 Figures, 1 Algorithm, To be published in the Proceedings of the "Causality for Robotics: Answering the Question of Why" workshop at the 2023 IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS), Final submission version

Uncertainties in the real world mean that is impossible for system designers to anticipate and explicitly design for all scenarios that a robot might encounter. Thus, robots designed like this are fragile and fail outside of highly-controlled environments. Causal models provide a principled framework to encode formal knowledge of the causal relationships that govern the robot's interaction with its environment, in addition to probabilistic representations of noise and uncertainty typically encountered by real-world robots. Combined with causal inference, these models permit an autonomous agent to understand, reason about, and explain its environment. In this work, we focus on the problem of a robot block-stacking task due to the fundamental perception and manipulation capabilities it demonstrates, required by many applications including warehouse logistics and domestic human support robotics. We propose a novel causal probabilistic framework to embed a physics simulation capability into a structural causal model to permit robots to perceive and assess the current state of a block-stacking task, reason about the next-best action from placement candidates, and generate post-hoc counterfactual explanations. We provide exemplar next-best action selection results and outline planned experimentation in simulated and real-world robot block-stacking tasks., Comment: 4 pages, 4 figures, camera-ready manuscript, accepted to the "Causality for Robotics: Answering the Question of Why" workshop at the 2023 IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS)

Gravity theories that modify General Relativity in the slow-motion regime can introduce nonperturbative corrections to the stochastic gravitational-wave background~(SGWB) from supermassive black-hole binaries in the nano-Hertz band, while remaining perturbative in the highly-relativistic regime and satisfying current post-Newtonian~(PN) constraints. We present a model-agnostic formalism to map such theories into a modified tilt for the SGWB spectrum, showing that negative PN corrections (in particular -2PN) can alleviate the tension in the recent pulsar-timing-array data if the detected SGWB is interpreted as arising from supermassive binaries. Despite being preliminary, current data have already strong constraining power, for example they set a novel (conservative) upper bound on theories with time-varying Newton's constant at least at the level of $\dot{G}/G \lesssim 10^{-5} \text{yr}^{-1}$ for redshift $z=[0.1\div1]$. We also show that NANOGrav data are best fitted by a broken power-law interpolating between a dominant -2PN or -3PN modification at low frequency, and the standard general-relativity scaling at high frequency. Nonetheless, a modified gravity explanation should be confronted with binary eccentricity, environmental effects, nonastrophysical origins of the signal, and scrutinized against statistical uncertainties. These novel tests of gravity will soon become more stringent when combining all pulsar-timing-array facilities and when collecting more data., Comment: 7 pages, 4 figures. Matches the published version

Spinning black holes can transfer a significant fraction of their energy to ultralight bosonic fields via superradiance, condensing them in a co-rotating structure or "cloud". This mechanism turns black holes into powerful particle detectors for bosons with extremely feeble interactions. To explore its full potential, the couplings between such particles and the Maxwell field in the presence of plasma need to be understood. In this work, we study these couplings using numerical relativity. We first focus on the coupled axion-Maxwell system evolving on a black hole background. By taking into account the axionic coupling concurrently with the growth of the cloud, we observe for the first time that a new stage emerges: that of a stationary state where a constant flux of electromagnetic waves is fed by superradiance, for which we find accurate analytical estimates. Moreover, we show that the existence of electromagnetic instabilities in the presence of plasma is entirely controlled by the axionic coupling; even for dense plasmas, an instability is triggered for high enough couplings., Comment: 33 pages, 24 figures; references and figure added

Electromagnetic field confinement due to plasma near accreting black holes can trigger superradiant instabilities at the linear level, limiting the spin of black holes and providing novel astrophysical sources of electromagnetic bursts. However, nonlinear effects might jeopardize the efficiency of the confinement, rending superradiance ineffective. Motivated by understanding nonlinear interactions in this scenario, here we study the full $3+1$ nonlinear dynamics of Maxwell equations in the presence of plasma by focusing on regimes that are seldom explored in standard plasma-physics applications, namely a generic electromagnetic wave of very large amplitude but small frequency propagating in an inhomogeneous, overdense plasma. We show that the plasma transparency effect predicted in certain specific scenarios is not the only possible outcome in the nonlinear regime: plasma blow-out due to nonlinear momentum transfer is generically present and allows for significant energy leakage of electromagnetic fields above a certain threshold. We argue that such effect is sufficient to dramatically quench the plasma-driven superradiant instability around black holes even in the most optimistic scenarios., Comment: 17 pages, 10 figures, animations of the simulations available at https://web.uniroma1.it/gmunu . v2: Minor corrections and extended discussion. v3: Typographical corrections. To appear in PRD

Robots operating in real-world environments must reason about possible outcomes of stochastic actions and make decisions based on partial observations of the true world state. A major challenge for making accurate and robust action predictions is the problem of confounding, which if left untreated can lead to prediction errors. The partially observable Markov decision process (POMDP) is a widely-used framework to model these stochastic and partially-observable decision-making problems. However, due to a lack of explicit causal semantics, POMDP planning methods are prone to confounding bias and thus in the presence of unobserved confounders may produce underperforming policies. This paper presents a novel causally-informed extension of "anytime regularized determinized sparse partially observable tree" (AR-DESPOT), a modern anytime online POMDP planner, using causal modelling and inference to eliminate errors caused by unmeasured confounder variables. We further propose a method to learn offline the partial parameterisation of the causal model for planning, from ground truth model data. We evaluate our methods on a toy problem with an unobserved confounder and show that the learned causal model is highly accurate, while our planning method is more robust to confounding and produces overall higher performing policies than AR-DESPOT., Comment: 8 pages, 3 figures, accepted to 2023 IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS)

The goal of the present paper is to establish a framework which allows to rigorously determine the large-scale Gaussian fluctuations for a class of singular SPDEs at and above criticality, and therefore beyond the range of applicability of pathwise techniques, such as the theory of Regularity Structures. To this purpose, we focus on a $d$-dimensional generalization of the Stochastic Burgers equation (SBE) introduced in [H. van Beijeren, R. Kutner and H. Spohn, Excess noise for driven diffusive systems, PRL, 1985]. In both the critical $d=2$ and super-critical $d\geq 3$ cases, we show that the scaling limit of (the regularised) SBE is given by a stochastic heat equation with non-trivially renormalised coefficient, introducing a set of tools that we expect to be applicable more widely. For $d\ge3$ the scaling adopted is the classical diffusive one, while in $d=2$ it is the weak coupling scaling which corresponds to tuning down the strength of the interaction in a scale-dependent way., Comment: 68 pages, 4 figures. A mistake in an earlier version has been corrected

We study the equilibrium fluctuations of an interacting particle system evolving on the discrete ring with $N\in\mathbb N$ points, denoted by $\mathbb T_N$, and with three species of particles that we name $A,B$ and $C$, but such that at each site there is only one particle. We prove that proper choices of density fluctuation fields (that match those from nonlinear fluctuating hydrodynamics theory) associated to the (two) conserved quantities converge, in the limit $N\to\infty$, to a system of stochastic partial differential equations, that can either be the Ornstein-Uhlenbeck equation or the Stochastic Burgers equation. To understand the cross interaction between the two conserved quantities, we derive a general version of the Riemann-Lebesgue lemma which is of independent interest., Comment: 44 pages

CSS100217 was a nuclear, rapid and luminous flare in a Narrow-Line Seyfert 1 galaxy, whose initial interpretation as a supernova is now debated between variability of the active galactic nucleus (AGN) or a tidal disruption event (TDE). In this paper, we present and discuss new evidence in favour of a TDE or extreme flaring episode scenario. After the decay of the flare, the galaxy entered a long-term low luminosity state, 0.4 magnitudes lower than the pre-outburst emission in the V band. We attribute this to the creation of a cavity in the accretion disk after the tidal disruption of a star in a retrograde orbit with respect to the accretion disk rotation, making a TDE our favoured interpretation of the flare. We also show how the host galaxy shows a point-like, compact profile, no evidence for an extended component and a relatively low mass, unlike what expected from an AGN host galaxy at z=0.147. A compact host galaxy may result in an increased TDE rate, strengthening our interpretation of the event., Comment: 11 pages, 4 figures, accepted for publication on MNRAS

Black-hole superradiance has been used to place very strong bounds on a variety of models of ultralight bosons such as axions, new light scalars, and dark photons. It is common lore to believe that superradiance bounds are broadly model independent and therefore pretty robust. In this work we show however that superradiance bounds on dark photons can be challenged by simple, compelling extensions of the minimal model. In particular, if the dark photon populates a larger dark sector and couples to dark fermions playing the role of dark matter, then superradiance bounds can easily be circumvented, depending on the mass and (dark) charge of the dark matter., Comment: 10+3 pages, 4 figures

We present the results from a dense multi-wavelength (optical/UV, near-infrared (IR), and X-ray) follow-up campaign of the nuclear transient AT2017gge, covering a total of 1698 days from the transient's discovery. The bolometric lightcurve, the black body temperature and radius, the broad H and He I $\lambda$5876 emission lines and their evolution with time, are all consistent with a tidal disruption event (TDE) nature. A soft X-ray flare is detected with a delay of $\sim$200 days with respect to the optical/UV peak and it is rapidly followed by the emergence of a broad He II $\lambda$4686 and by a number of long-lasting high ionization coronal emission lines. This indicate a clear connection between a TDE flare and the appearance of extreme coronal line emission (ECLEs). An IR echo, resulting from dust re-radiation of the optical/UV TDE light is observed after the X-ray flare and the associated near-IR spectra show a transient broad feature in correspondence of the He I $\lambda$10830 and, for the first time in a TDE, a transient high-ionization coronal NIR line (the [Fe XIII] $\lambda$10798) is also detected. The data are well explained by a scenario in which a TDE occurs in a gas and dust rich environment and its optical/UV, soft X-ray, and IR emission have different origins and locations. The optical emission may be produced by stellar debris stream collisions prior to the accretion disk formation, which is instead responsible for the soft X-ray flare, emitted after the end of the circularization process., Comment: Accepted for publication in MNRAS