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.

Area Scaling of Dynamical Degrees of Freedom in Regularised Scalar Field Theory

Using symplectic model order reduction, this paper demonstrates that the minimal number of canonical degrees of freedom required to describe the Hamiltonian evolution of a regularised scalar field scales with the area of the region rather than its volume, a phenomenon driven by the count of distinct normal-mode frequencies and observed in both flat and curved spacetimes as well as weakly interacting theories.

Oliver Friedrich, Kristina Giesel, Varun Kushwaha2026-04-10⚛️ hep-ph

Electromagnetic wave propagation in static black hole spacetimes: an effective refractive index description in Schwarzschild geometry

This paper presents a fully covariant and gauge-invariant formulation of electromagnetic wave propagation in static black hole spacetimes that reduces both axial and polar sectors to a unified master equation, enabling the derivation of a closed-form, position- and frequency-dependent effective refractive index in Schwarzschild geometry to provide an intuitive optical framework for analyzing gravitational effects on wave dynamics.

Abdullah Guvendi, Omar Mustafa Semra Gurtas Dogan, Hassan Hassanabadi2026-04-10⚛️ gr-qc

Holographic Krylov Complexity for Charged, Composite and Extended Probes

This paper investigates holographic Krylov complexity for various probes in AdS5×S5_5\times S^5, demonstrating that while charged and composite pointlike probes retain universal leading growth with informative subleading corrections, genuinely extended operators exhibit qualitatively distinct intermediate behaviors that reveal a finer sensitivity to spatial structure.

Horatiu Nastase, Carlos Nunez, Dibakar Roychowdhury2026-04-10⚛️ hep-th

Scalars at the Cosmological Collider: Full Shapes of Tree Diagrams and Bispectrum Searches using Planck Data

This paper provides a unified derivation of the full bispectrum shapes for single, double, and triple exchange processes involving massive scalars in the Cosmological Collider framework and reports a null result from Planck data, while identifying a 1.5σ\sigma hint of non-Gaussianity in an extended scenario featuring a scalar chemical potential that allows for on-shell production of super-Hubble mass particles.

Soubhik Kumar, Qianshu Lu, Zhong-Zhi Xianyu, Yisong Zhang2026-04-10⚛️ hep-ph

Resurgence of high-energy string amplitudes

This paper analyzes the fixed-angle high-energy limit of nn-point tree-level string amplitudes through diverse mathematical frameworks, revealing that their asymptotic structure is governed by Bernoulli numbers rather than multiple zeta values, and utilizes resurgence theory to construct transseries that unify low- and high-energy expansions while providing a new double-copy representation for closed-string amplitudes via twisted de Rham theory.

Xavier Kervyn, Stephan Stieberger2026-04-10⚛️ hep-th