Modern Physics Letters A

The Gran Sasso National Laboratory of INFN (LNGS) is the largest underground laboratory for astroparticle physics in the world. Located in Italy between the cities of L'Aquila and Teramo, 120 km far from Rome, is a research infrastructure mainly dedicated to astroparticle and neutrino physics. It offers the most advanced underground facility in terms of dimensions, complexity and completeness of its infrastructures. LNGS is one of the four national laboratories run by the Istituto Nazionale di Fisica Nucleare (INFN).

The scientific program at LNGS is mainly focused on astroparticle, particle and nuclear physics. The laboratory presently hosts many experiments as well as R&D activities, including world-leading research in the fields of solar neutrinos, accelerator neutrinos (CNGS neutrino beam from CERN to Gran Sasso), dark matter (DM), neutrinoless double beta decay (2β0ν) and nuclear cross-section of astrophysical interest. Associate sciences like earth physics, biology and fundamental physics complement the activities. The laboratory is operated as an international science facility and hosts experiments whose scientific merit is assessed by an international advisory Scientific Committee.

A review of the main experiments carried out at LNGS will be given, together with the most recent and relevant scientific results achieved.

We examined HZγ vertex and obtained the limits on anomalous a_γ, b_γ and couplings in a model-independent way through the γp collisions via the process pp→p γp→pHqX. The sensitivities to the anomalous couplings can be obtained as |b_γ|, for the integrated luminosity of L_int = 100 fb^-1 at the LHC with .

Using exclusively an action variable, we quantize a static, spherically symmetric black hole. The spacings of the quantized entropy spectrum and area spectrum are found to be equal to the values given by Bekenstein. Interestingly, we find the spectra are independent of the hairs of the black holes and the mode of motion of a particle outside the spacetime, which depends only on the intrinsic properties of the gravity. Our result shows that the spectra are universal provided the spacetime owns a horizon.

We apply analytic perturbation theory (APT) to the QCD analysis of the xF₃(x, Q²) structure function considering a combined set of deep inelastic scattering data presented by several collaborations, and extract values of the scale parameter Λ_QCD, the parameters of the form of the xF₃ structure function, and the x-shape of the higher twist (HT) contribution. We study the difference between the results obtained within the standard perturbative and analytic approaches in comparison with the experimental errors and state that the greatest difference occurs for large x.

We show that a theory with conformal invariance, which is explicitly broken by small terms, provides a solution to the fine tuning problem of the cosmological constant. In the absence of the symmetry breaking terms, the cosmological constant is zero. Its value in the full theory is controlled by the symmetry breaking terms. The symmetry breaking terms also provide the slow-roll conditions, which may be useful in constructing a model of inflation.

The measurement of the tensor-to-scalar ratio r shows a very powerful constraint to theoretical inflation models through the detection of B-mode. In this paper, we propose a single inflation model with infinity power series potential called the Infinity Power Series (IPS) inflation model, which is well consistent with latest observations from Planck and BICEP2. Furthermore, it is found that in the IPS model, the absolute value running of the spectral index increases while the tensor-to-scalar ratio becomes large, namely both large r ≈0.20 and are realized in the IPS model. In the meanwhile, the number of e-folds is also big enough N≈50–60 to solve the problems in Big Bang cosmology.

In the framework of Lorentzian multiply warped products we study the magnetically charged Gibbons–Maeda–Garfinkle–Horowitz–Strominger (GMGHS) interior spacetime in the string frame. We also investigate geodesic motion in various hypersurfaces, and compare their solutions of geodesic equations with the ones obtained in the Einstein frame.