Pre-Registered Empirical Standards for the Persistence-Collapse Sector of Conditional Unlocking Fields (CUF) Across Five Benchmark Systems and One Adversarial Null Control

This record contains the locked V5 preregistration for the empirical standards program of the persistence collapse sector of Conditional Unlocking Fields (CUF). V5 is not a general expansion of earlier benchmarks and does not claim to test the full canonical CUF formalism. Its purpose is narrower and more precise: to determine under what conditions, by what rules, and with what admissible empirical quantities the persistence collapse sector of CUF can be treated as a standards governed empirical layer. The preregistration formalizes the lessons learned from V4 and turns them into explicit standards structure. It preserves the distinction between canonical candidate quantities, standardizable quantities, and exploratory quantities; introduces an adversarial null control to test false positive cliff detection; requires observable tier validation across native, generic, and transformed observables for the strongest benchmark systems; and preserves protocol-mismatch, null, and failure outcomes as scientifically meaningful rather than as results to be filtered away. It also declares the limits of the present operationalization, including the fact that this study concerns the persistence collapse sector only and should not be read as a total validation of CUF canon. The registered benchmark covers five benchmark systems together with one adversarial null control, uses a frozen harness with checksum locked identity, and defines the prediction set, success conditions, failure conditions, output package, and standards interpretation in advance of execution. The operational quantities include hard persistence, soft persistence, overflow or violation structure, cliff or no cliff classification, observable invariance assessment, and related standards oriented diagnostics. CUF language is used as the interpretation and standards layer, while the measured benchmark quantities remain operationally defined as preregistered. This upload should be read as the locked preregistered standards document for the V5 CUF empirical program. It is downstream of canonical CUF mathematics and upstream of the executed benchmark results. Its role is to define the admissible empirical structure of the persistence-collapse sector before execution and to preserve the exact scope, language, constraints, and standards logic under which the V5 benchmark is to be interpreted.