Hep-Th, or high-energy theoretical physics, explores the fundamental building blocks of our universe and the forces that govern them. Researchers in this field use complex mathematics to understand everything from subatomic particles to the behavior of black holes, often pushing the boundaries of what we know about space and time.

At Gist.Science, we monitor the arXiv repository to ensure you stay ahead of the curve in this rapidly evolving discipline. For every new preprint uploaded to arXiv under this category, our team generates both accessible plain-language overviews and detailed technical summaries, making cutting-edge research understandable regardless of your background.

Below are the latest papers in high-energy theoretical physics, curated to help you navigate the most significant recent discoveries.

Laser-assisted production of the light charged Higgs boson from top quark decay in the type-I two Higgs doublet model

This paper investigates the impact of a circularly polarized laser field on top quark decay within the type-I two Higgs doublet model, demonstrating that specific laser parameters can significantly enhance the branching ratio of the tbH+t \rightarrow bH^+ channel to 0.97, thereby surpassing the standard tbW+t \rightarrow bW^+ decay and offering a promising strategy for detecting charged Higgs bosons.

M. Jakha, S. Mouslih, M. Ouhammou, R. Chahri, S. El Asri, S. Taj, B. Manaut2026-04-03⚛️ hep-ph

Origin of the Covariant Wigner Operator as a Quantum Amplitude in QCD

This paper extends the Koopman-von Neumann-Sudarshan Hilbert space formulation to relativistic QCD, demonstrating that the covariant Wigner operator is fundamentally a quantum probability amplitude projected onto phase space, thereby offering a unified framework that clarifies the origin of nonclassical features like negativity and establishes a transparent foundation for parton distribution functions.

Chueng-Ryong Ji, Daniel W. Piasecki2026-04-03⚛️ hep-ph

Plummer Dark Matter Black Hole with Topological Defects: Shadow, Greybody Factors, Quasinormal Modes, and Thermodynamics

This paper presents a static, spherically symmetric black hole solution embedded in a Plummer dark matter halo and a Letelier cloud of strings, systematically analyzing its geometric properties, shadow, deflection angle, scalar perturbations, and thermodynamics to demonstrate that the string-cloud tension parameter α\alpha drives leading-order modifications to all observables while the dark matter halo density ρ0\rho_0 provides only subdominant corrections.

Ahmad Al-Badawi, Faizuddin Ahmed, \.Izzet Sakallı2026-04-03⚛️ gr-qc

Descending into the Modular Bootstrap

This paper employs machine-learning-style optimization, featuring a novel singular-value-based optimizer and uncertainty estimation, to numerically explore the landscape of two-dimensional conformal field theories with central charges between 1 and 8/7, identifying candidate spectra in a previously uncharted region and suggesting a tighter constraint on the spectral gap near c=1c=1.

Nathan Benjamin, A. Liam Fitzpatrick, Wei Li, Jesse Thaler2026-04-03⚛️ hep-th

Sven: Singular Value Descent as a Computationally Efficient Natural Gradient Method

The paper introduces Sven, a computationally efficient natural gradient optimization algorithm that utilizes a truncated singular value decomposition of the loss Jacobian to simultaneously satisfy individual data point residuals, offering faster convergence and lower final loss than standard first-order methods on regression tasks while scaling linearly with the number of retained singular directions rather than quadratically with the number of parameters.

Samuel Bright-Thonney, Thomas R. Harvey, Andre Lukas, Jesse Thaler2026-04-03🤖 cs.LG

Corrected Hawking Temperature and Final State of Black Hole Evaporation Under GEVAG Framework

This paper demonstrates that within the GEVAG framework, promoting the horizon-area-dependent effective gravitational constant to the horizon neighborhood yields a corrected Hawking temperature with a second term that drives the temperature to zero at a minimum mass, thereby resolving the nonzero remnant temperature inconsistency found in Generalized Uncertainty Principle (GUP) approaches while providing general formulas for thermodynamic energy and the Bekenstein bound.

Yen Chin Ong2026-04-03⚛️ gr-qc