Fractional Soft Limits of Scattering Amplitudes.

It is a common lore that the amplitude for a scattering process involving one soft Nambu-Goldstone boson should scale like an integer power of the soft momentum. We revisit this expectation by considering the 2→2 scattering of phonons in solids. We show that, depending on the helicities of the phonons involved in the scattering process, the scattering amplitude may in fact vanish like a fractional power of the soft momentum. This is a peculiarity of the 4-point amplitude, which can be traced back to (1) the (spontaneous or explicit) breaking of Lorentz invariance, and (2) the approximately collinear kinematics arising when one of the phonons becomes soft. Our results extend to the general class of nonrelativistic shift-invariant theories of a vector field.

Universal Relation between Corrections to Entropy and Extremality.

Perturbative corrections to general relativity alter the expressions for both the entropy of black holes and their extremality bounds. We prove a universal relation between the leading corrections to these quantities. The derivation is purely thermodynamic and the result also applies beyond the realm of gravitational systems. In scenarios where the correction to the entropy is positive, our result proves that the perturbations decrease the mass of extremal black holes, when holding all other extensive variables fixed in the comparison. This implies that the extremality relations of a wide class of black holes display weak gravity conjecture-like behavior.

Wess-Zumino terms for relativistic fluids, superfluids, solids, and supersolids.

We use the coset construction of low-energy effective actions to systematically derive Wess-Zumino (WZ) terms for fluid and isotropic solid systems in two, three, and four spacetime dimensions. We recover the known WZ term for fluids in two dimensions as well as the very recently found WZ term for fluids in three dimensions. We find two new WZ terms for supersolids that have not previously appeared in the literature. In addition, by relaxing certain assumptions about the symmetry group of fluids we find a number of new WZ terms for fluids with and without charge, in all dimensions. We find no WZ terms for solids and superfluids.