高能物理·理论：2025–2026 年度综述

An annual survey of the hep-th arXiv category, covering research published from September 2025 – August 2026. Built on a close-reading set of 132 papers and organised into 37 chapters, it maps the year by the field's research sub-directions.

Book framework (share of the year's output):

• Holographic Duality and Black Hole Thermodynamics (72.7%) — Explores the correspondence between quantum gravity in anti-de Sitter space and conformal field theories, focusing on black hole entropy, entanglement structure, and holographic tensor networks.
• Cosmological Inflation and Dark Matter Phenomenology (13.9%) — Investigates early universe dynamics including inflationary models, gravitational wave signatures, and the particle physics of dark matter sectors within cosmological contexts.
• Effective Field Theory and Scattering Amplitudes (5.0%) — Develops computational techniques for high-energy scattering, classical gravity limits, and effective actions using perturbative expansions and amplitude methods.
• Symmetry Breaking and Strong Interaction Dynamics (4.6%) — Analyzes spontaneous symmetry breaking, chiral dynamics, and thermal properties of strongly coupled systems, including axion physics and neutron star matter.
• Feynman Integral Reduction and Geometric Methods (1.0%) — Applies advanced mathematical structures such as polytopes, differential equations, and intersection theory to the calculation and reduction of Feynman integrals.
• Relativistic Fluid Dynamics and Effective Actions (0.9%) — Constructs formalisms for relativistic viscous fluids and scalar-tensor theories, addressing causality, dispersion spectra, and initial data in gravitational contexts.
• Matrix Models and Compact Object Physics (0.7%) — Studies matrix quantum mechanics, superintegrability, and the stability of exotic compact objects like neutron stars and dark matter hybrids.
• Integrable Systems and Topological Field Theories (0.4%) — Explores integrable deformations, Chern-Simons theories, and canonical quantization methods in lower-dimensional and topological settings.
• Numerical Simulations and Lattice Dynamics (0.3%) — Utilizes numerical techniques, lattice simulations, and hydrodynamic models to study decoherence, black hole evaporation, and complex system evolution.
• Topological Field Theory Reviews and Lectures (0.2%) — Provides introductory overviews and lecture notes on topological field theories, quiver Yangians, and differential cohomology in theoretical physics.
• General Relativity Modifications and Quantum Gravity (0.2%) — Examines deviations from general relativity, modified gravity theories, and quantum state distinguishability under generalized symmetries.

Each sub-direction is covered across three chapters — how it framed its questions, the strength of its key findings, and its open debates and frontiers — so the reader gets a traceable picture of what this part of the field actually produced over the year.