hep-th papers | Gist.Science

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.

Highest-weight truncation, graded EFT structure, and renormalization of black hole Love numbers

This paper demonstrates that the vanishing of static tidal Love numbers in four-dimensional black holes is a structural consequence of a common near-zone truncation mechanism, where horizon regularity forces static solutions into highest-weight representations that eliminate independent decaying branches, thereby excluding static Wilson coefficients and generating a graded algebra of logarithms and zeta values that precludes any static invariant.

Naman Kumar2026-04-02⚛️ gr-qc

Zeno-Constrained Formation of Relativistic Mass Shells

This paper demonstrates that strong continuous monitoring of a quadratic form in an extended Euclidean momentum space within an open quantum system induces a quantum Zeno effect that drives the dynamics toward an infrared fixed point with Lorentzian signature, thereby emergently generating relativistic kinematics and mass-shell constraints from non-relativistic quantum Boltzmann dynamics.

Ansgar Pernice2026-04-02⚛️ quant-ph

An All-Loop Amplituhedron in Two Dimensions

This paper introduces a two-dimensional positive geometry called the all-loop amplituhedron, which generalizes loop amplituhedra to $\mathbb{R}^{1,1}$ , allows for the exact calculation of canonical forms corresponding to massless banana graphs, and reveals that their integrated IR divergences exponentiate and resum into a Fox--Wright function, offering a tractable model for exploring loop amplitude geometry and strong-coupling dualities.

Jonah Stalknecht2026-04-02⚛️ hep-th

Improving parton shower predictions via precision moments of energy flow polynomials

This paper proposes a systematic framework using maximum-entropy reweighting and precision moments of energy flow polynomials to upgrade parton-shower event samples with higher-accuracy theoretical constraints, thereby restoring physical behavior and improving predictions across a broad range of observables while preserving full event-level exclusivity.

Benoît Assi, Kyle Lee, Jesse Thaler2026-04-02⚛️ hep-ph

Instanton condensation and a new phase of BPS black holes

This paper identifies a new instability in the microcanonical ensemble of 1/16-BPS black holes in $AdS_5 \times S^5$ driven by instanton condensation, which signals a previously overlooked dominant phase near the small black hole regime and offers a resolution to the location of the partially deconfined phase in the holographic dual.

Jack Holden2026-04-02⚛️ hep-th

Light-by-light scattering: asymptotic expansions, Coulomb resummation and NLO corrections

This paper refines theoretical predictions for light-by-light scattering by improving two-loop helicity amplitudes with asymptotic expansions and Coulomb resummation, providing state-of-the-art Standard Model cross-section calculations and a new Monte Carlo event generator named LbLatNLO.

Ajjath A H, Ekta Chaubey, Hua-Sheng Shao2026-04-02⚛️ nucl-ex

Full positivity bounds for anomalous quartic gauge couplings in SMEFT

This paper derives the complete set of positivity bounds for all 22 dimension-8 anomalous quartic gauge coupling coefficients in SMEFT by incorporating all electroweak boson modes and constructing extremal rays via group theory, revealing that these constraints reduce the viable parameter space to approximately 0.0313% and providing a Python package for numerical verification.

Fu-Ming Chang, Zhuo-Yan Chen, Shuang-Yong Zhou2026-04-02⚛️ hep-ph

de Sitter extremal surfaces, time contours, complexifications and pseudo-entropies

This paper investigates no-boundary de Sitter extremal surfaces and their associated pseudo-entropies by utilizing complex time contours to analyze both large and small subregions, revealing geometric equivalences and suggesting that de Sitter entropy inequalities can be encoded via analytic continuation of AdS counterparts.

K. Narayan2026-04-02⚛️ hep-th

How to (Non-)Perturb a BPS Black Hole

This paper establishes a direct link between non-perturbative corrections to BPS black hole observables in flat spacetime and the dynamics of probe charged particles in the near-horizon $\text{AdS}_2\times \mathbf{S}^2$ geometry, demonstrating that the exact path integral of these probes reproduces the Gopakumar--Vafa integral and reveals how the black hole's physics is controlled by light D-brane states.

Alberto Castellano, Matteo Zatti2026-04-02⚛️ hep-th

Manifest Moebius invariance of massive tree-level three-point amplitudes in pure spinor superspace

This paper establishes a manifestly Möbius-invariant, compact nested-bracket representation for massive tree-level three-point open-string amplitudes in pure spinor superspace by leveraging BRST cohomology properties and deriving new recurrence relations to extend the result to arbitrary mass levels.

Chen Huang, Carlos R. Mafra, Yi-Xiao Tao2026-04-02⚛️ hep-th

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