We explain how the Swampland criteria combined with observational data and in particular a small dark energy, leads to the prediction of a single mesoscopic dimension of length in the micron range. We also explain how this can lead to a unification of cosmological and electroweak hierarchies.
In this talk we will revisit supergravity models with dark
matter candidate particles like neutralino and gravitino.
Moreover, we will discuss the possibility that primordial black
holes play the role of the dark matter of the Universe.
The Higgs sector of the Next-to-Minimal Supersymmetric Standard Model can accommodate explicit CP-violating phases at the tree level, unlike the minimal scenario. In particular, the phase of the parameter that governs the singlet-singlino mass is relevant for the phenomenology of the dark matter in the model also, when R-parity is conserved. A small magnitude of this parameter can yield a...
Various theories beyond the Standard Model predict new, long-lived particles with unique signatures which are difficult to reconstruct and for which estimating the background rates is also a challenge. Signatures from displaced and/or delayed decays anywhere from the inner detector to the muon spectrometer, as well as those of new particles with fractional or multiple values of the charge of...
MicroBooNE is an 85-tonne active mass liquid argon time projection chamber (LArTPC) at Fermilab. It has excellent calorimetric, spatial and energy resolution and is exposed to two neutrino beams, which make it a powerful detector not just for neutrino physics, but also for Beyond the Standard Model (BSM) physics. The experiment has competitive sensitivity to heavy neutral leptons possibly...
Many theories beyond the Standard Model predict new phenomena, such as $Z'$, $W'$ bosons, or heavy leptons, in final states with isolated, high-pt leptons (e/mu/tau). Searches for new physics with such signatures, produced either resonantly or non-resonantly, are performed using the ATLAS experiment at the LHC. This includes a novel search that exploits the lepton-charge asymmetry in events...
This talk is based on our recent paper arXiv:2109.10093.
The MUonE collaboration intends to assess the hadronic vacuum polarization contribution to the muon $g-2$ via the elastic scattering process $\mu e \to \mu e$. I will discuss the prospects of probing the $L_{\mu}−L_{\tau}$ gauge boson at the MUonE experiment. The $L_{\mu}−L_{\tau}$ gauge boson $Z′$, which can explain the...
The presence of a non-baryonic Dark Matter (DM) component in the Universe is inferred from the observation of its gravitational interaction. If Dark Matter interacts weakly with the Standard Model (SM) it could be produced at the LHC. The ATLAS experiment has developed a broad search program for DM candidates in final states with large missing transverse momentum produced in association with...
The nature of dark matter, one of the major components of the cosmic
standard model, remains one of the outstanding problems in physics. One
interesting model is scalar field dark matter (SFDM), which fits naturally
into observations in both particle physics and cosmology. Simulations and
calculations using SFDM often use a classical field approximation (MFT) of
the underlying quantum...
Various Supersymmetry (SUSY) scenarios, including split SUSY and anomaly or gravity-mediated SUSY-breaking scenarios, lead to signatures with long-lived particles. Searches for these processes may target either the long lived particle itself or its decay products at a significant distance from the collision point. These signatures provide interesting technical challenges due to their special...
The quest for Dark Matter (DM) and its nature has been puzzling scientists for nearly a century. This puzzle has engendered theories that span nearly hundred orders of magnitude in mass scales with widely contrasting nature. It has also motivated decades of experimental efforts correspondingly different in the wide variety of their target masses, observables, technologies and interpretations....
We study a minimal model for light scalar dark matter (DM) which requires a light scalar mediator to address the core-cusp problem as well as to interact with the standard model. We focus on the Breit-Wigner resonance for the DM annihilation and self-scattering channels. The thermally-averaged annihilation cross-section of DM has strong temperature dependence, whereas its energy exchange by...
The direct production of electroweak SUSY particles, including sleptons, charginos, and neutralinos, is a particularly interesting area with connections to dark matter and the naturalness of the Higgs mass. The small production cross sections lead to difficult searches, despite relatively clean final states. This talk will highlight the most recent results of searches performed by the ATLAS...
We study models of cosmic inflation in order to explain the production of primordial black holes (PBHs), which can amount of a significant fraction of dark matter (DM) in the universe and the induced gravitational waves (GWs). In particular, we present mechanisms which lead to an enhancement of the scalar power spectrum at small scales. This amplification can explain the generation of PBHs and...
Supersymmetry (SUSY) provides elegant solutions to several problems in the Standard Model, and searches for SUSY particles are an important component of the LHC physics program. Naturalness arguments for weak-scale supersymmetry favour supersymmetric partners of the gluons and third generation quarks with masses light enough to be produced at the LHC. This talk will present the latest results...
The Jiangmen Underground Neutrino Observatory (JUNO) is a 20 kton multi‑purpose underground liquid scintillator detector currently under construction at a baseline of about 52.5 km from eight nuclear reactors in the Guangdong Province of South China. By featuring a 78% photon sensor coverage achieved via a primary calorimetry system consisting of 17,612 20‑inch PMTs and an additional...
With the pp collision dataset collected at 13 TeV, detailed measurements of Higgs boson properties can be performed. The Higgs kinematic properties can be measured with increasing granularity and interpreted to constrain beyond-the-Standard-Model phenomena. This talk presents the measurements of the Higgs boson fiducial and differential cross sections exploiting various Higgs boson decays, as...
The twin Higgs framework offers an explanation of the little hierarchy problem while remaining consistent with the bounds on new colored states. This scenario also offers a concrete model of richly varied hidden sectors. Typically, the twin sector includes a SU(3) confining force which binds the twin quarks into hadrons. I outline how twin color can be spontaneously broken. In this case the...
The study of the Higgs boson properties provides a unique window for the discovery of new physics at the LHC. New phenomena can in particular be revealed in the search for rare, lepton-flavor-violating or exotic decays of the Higgs boson, as well as in its possible couplings to hidden-sector states that do not interact under Standard Model gauge transformations. This talk presents recent...
The discovery of the Higgs boson with the mass of about 125 GeV completed the particle content predicted by the Standard Model. Even though this model is well established and consistent with many measurements, it is not capable to solely explain some observations. Many extensions of the Standard Model addressing such shortcomings, including several SUSY benchmark models, introduce additional...
The standard model of cosmology is based on the assumption that the universe is (statistically) isotropic and homogeneous. The dipole anisotropy of the CMB must then be attributed to our peculiar motion, due to local inhomogeneity, wrt the cosmic rest frame in which the CMB looks isotropic. If so, there should be a corresponding dipole in the skymap of high redshift sources. Using catalogues...
We present the motivation for the celestial holography program, recent progress, and ongoing questions!
The ATLAS experiment has performed measurements of $B$-meson rare decays proceeding via suppressed electroweak flavour changing neutral currents, and of mixing and CP violation in the neutral $B^0_s$ meson system. This talk will focus on the latest results from the ATLAS collaboration, such as rare processes $B^0_s \to \mu \mu$ and $B^0_d \to \mu \mu$, and CP violation in $B^0_s \to J/\psi...
Recent results on searches for supersymmetric partners of top quarks and gluons with the CMS detector are presented. The results are based on proton-proton collisions recorded at $\sqrt{s} = 13 ~TeV$ with the CMS detector using the full Run 2 dataset of $138 ~fb^{-1}$.
We study implications of non-local interactions, assuming an effective gaussian localization of interaction vertices. We present the analytical form of a transition amplitude, and discuss possible phenomenological applications of this approach.
Results from the CMS experiment are presented for electroweak production of supersymmetric partners in hadronic final states. The searches use proton-proton collision data with luminosity up to 138 fb-1 recorded by the CMS detector at center of mass energy 13 TeV during the LHC Run 2.
This talk is based on arXiv:2112.10337. We study the seesaw mechanism in the supersymmetric standard model (SSM) with the $Z_3$ symmetry called Matter triality ($M_3$). The Abelian discrete symmetry prohibits the baryon number violation operators at the (non-)renormalizable level, which ensures the proton longevity. The cubic coupling by the right-handed neutrinos generates the Majorana mass...
Experimental hints for lepton flavor universality violation in beauty-quark decay both in neutral- and charged-current transitions require an extension of the Standard Model for which scalar leptoquarks (LQs) are the prime candidates. Besides, these same LQs can resolve the long-standing tension in the muon and the recently reported deviation in the electron $g-2$ anomalies. These tantalizing...
The MoEDAL experiment at the LHC has been designed to search for highly ionising avatars of New Physics such as magnetic monopoles and dyons. Hypothetical stable particles of single or multiple electric charge, that arise in models of supersymmetry, quirks, strangelets, Q-balls, or as black-hole remnants, can be detected in MoEDAL. The recent analysis of a prototype nuclear track detector has...
In this talk, I will present an explicit string realisation of a cosmological inflationary scenario within the framework of type IIB flux compactifications in the presence of three magnetised D7-brane stacks. Inflation takes place around a metastable de Sitter vacuum. The scalar potential of the inflaton, identified with the volume modulus, exhibits a very shallow minimum. Inflation ends due...
We consider a class of integrable deformations of current algebra/coset CFTs by current/parafermion bilinears, known as \lambda-deformed models. We dynamically promote the deformation parameters by introducing time as an extra coordinate and we enforce conformal invariance at one-loop order. The derived model obeys a system of non-linear second-order ordinary differential equations and by...
This talk reviews recent measurements of multiboson production using CMS data. Inclusive and differential cross sections are measured using several kinematic observables.
Inspired by the latest measurement of muon anomalous magnetic moment (muon g-2) by FermiLab we explore the implications about muon g-2 of supersymmetric grand unified theories (GUTs) in a class with non-universal gaugino masses at the GUT scale. The discrepancy between the Standard Model (SM) predictions and the experimental results in muon g-2 can be solved by the contributions from the...
I would like to present an intriguing new perspective into such fundamental questions as 1) the origin of the gauge interactions in the Standard Model (SM), and 2) the origin of the quark, lepton and neutrino families' replication and their fundamental properties experimentally observed in Nature. These questions can be addressed by tying together in a common framework both flavour physics and...
We discuss flux compactifications of massive Type IIA string theory on G2 spaces with O2/O6-planes to three dimensions. We start by presenting the setup of allowed fluxes, internal geometry and equations of motion and after compactification we achieve N=1 and N=0 $\text{AdS}_3$ vacua with scale that can be parametrically decoupled from the KK modes. We use the smeared approximation description...
We discuss the one-loop SUSY-QCD corrections to the neutralino relic density for pMSSM scenarios with light stops where we focus on stop annihilation into gluons and light quarks including Sommerfeld enhancement effects. These corrections are important as stop (co)-annihilation becomes the dominant contribution to the relic density for scenarios with a small mass difference between the...
Two Higgs Doublet Models (2HDM) provide a simple framework for new physics models with an extended Higgs sector. The current LHC results, including both direct searches for additional non-Standard Model (SM) Higgs bosons, as well as precision measurements of the SM-like Higgs couplings, already provide strong constraints on the 2HDM parameter spaces. In this work, we examine those constraints...
This talk focuses on a collection of ideas that explain why the Standard Model (SM) should be completed by a graviton, graviphotons, axions, and neutrinos (and maybe other stuff) emerging from a hidden sector.
This task will be accomplished in a novel framework, where the SM is coupled to a holographic theory. The new particles will be composites and, in almost all cases, are distinct...
There is growing evidence for lepton-flavour non-universality, notably due to recent measurements of the magnetic moment of the muon and the LFU ratios $R(D)$ and $R(D^\star)$. We propose a model involving a scalar leptoquark which can ameliorate the tensions with the SM prediction in either case, while accommodating the mass hierarchies and mixing of the charged SM fermions. Crucially, the...
We generalize the Quantum Geometric Tensor by replacing a Hamiltonian with a modular Hamiltonian. The symmetric part of the Quantum Geometric Tensor provides a Fubini-Study metric, and its anti-symmetric sector gives a Berry curvature. Our generalization dubbed Quantum Modular Geometric Tensor gives the metric and curvature of a Kinematic Space. We also use the result of the identity Virasoro...
We will discuss the possibility of unifying in a simple and economical manner the
Yukawa couplings of third-generation fermions in a non-supersymmetric SO(10) model with an intermediate symmetry breaking, focusing on two possible patterns
with intermediate Pati-Salam and minimal left-right groups. For this purpose,
we start with a two Higgs doublet model at the electroweak scale and assume...
Despite its immense success, the standard model fails to answer issues such as the stability of the electroweak vacuum or matter dominance over antimatter in the Universe. The Higgs boson and top quark sector hold the key to the answer. We need precise values of their couplings for the correct theoretical description of the said issues. Through a framework of the effective theory, we address...
I discuss a framework in which a low-energy effective Chern-Simons (CS) modification of General relativity emerges as a viable cosmological model from string theory. Condensation of CP-violating primordial gravitational waves can lead to non-trivial CS anomaly condensates, which drive inflation without external inflaton fields, of running vacuum model type.
The string-model independent axion...
A toy-model is presented, which considers two flat directions meeting at an enhanced symmetry point such that they realise the usual hybrid inflation mechanism. The kinetic term of the waterfall field features a pole at its Planckian vacuum expectation value (VEV), as in alpha-attractors. Consequently, after the phase transition which terminates hybrid inflation, the waterfall field never...
We consider a real scalar field in de Sitter background and compute its thermal propagators.
We propose that non-trivial thermal effects in the |out⟩ vacuum can be encoded in the anomalous
dimensions of the d = 3 Ising model. One of these anomalous dimensions, the critical exponent
η, fixes completely a number of cosmological observables, which we compute.
I will present a recently proposed approach to detect photon-coupled dark matter axions in an RF cavity. The approach relies on axion-mediated transitions between nearly-degenerate resonant modes, leading to parametrically enhanced signal power for light axions. We will discuss how a resonant signal is generated, and how it compares with traditional haloscope searches. We will also discuss...
Recent measurements of inclusive and differential cross sections for top quark pair or single top productions are presented using the data collected by the CMS detector. The differential cross sections are measured multi-differentially as a function of various kinematic observables of top quarks, jets, leptons of the event final state. Results for ttbar cross sections are compared to precise...
We study the impact of sphaleron-induced thermal friction on the axion dark-matter abundance due to the interaction of an axion-like particle (ALP) with a dark non-abelian gauge sector in a secluded thermal bath. Thermal friction can either enhance the axion relic density by delaying the onset of oscillations or suppress it by damping them. We derive an analytical formula for the frictional...
I will show that critical de Sitter points of gauged Supergravity are typically in conflict with the Weak Gravity Conjecture when the gravitino has a vanishing or parametrically small mass. This puts all known stable de Sitter vacua of the N=2 theory in the Swampland.
Results from the CMS experiment are presented for electroweak production of supersymmetric partners in leptonic final states. Searches are performed for a wide range of SUSY spectra including so-called compressed spectra. The searches use proton-proton collision data with luminosity up to 138 fb-1 recorded by the CMS detector at center of mass energy 13 TeV during the LHC Run 2.
Since the classic searches for supersymmetry have not given any strong indication for new physics, more and more supersymmetry searches target the more difficult, unconventional, or specific scenarios. This talk focuses on searches looking for signatures of stealth and R-parity-violating supersymmetry as well as SUSY models with long-lived particles or with compressed mass spectra that require...
In this talk we will consider a model of infation in the Palatini formulation of gravity with the addition of quadratic in curvature terms in the usual Einstein-Hilbert action.
The model under consideration corresponds to a two-field scalar-tensor theory, that involves the Higgs field and an extra scalar field stemming from a gauge U(1)_X extension of the Standard Model, which contains an...
We consider hybrid inflation models in the framework of no-scale supergravity. $U(1)_R$ symmetry can be broken on the renormalizable level or by Planck suppressed non-renormalizable operators. We show that a Starobinsky like inflation can be realized with asymptotically flat potentials for specific region of parameter space. A connection to the low energy physics as well as the neutrino...
The Standard Model (SM) of particle physics suffers from the hierarchy problem which can be ameliorated if all the scales that we observe in nature are considered not to be fundamental but generated dynamically in nature. As examples, we will discuss freeze-out and freeze-in production of vector dark matter (DM) in a classically scale invariant theory, where the Standard Model (SM) is...
Results from the CMS experiment are presented for searches for supersymmetric particle production with tau leptons in the final state. The searches use proton-proton collision data with luminosity up to 138 fb-1 recorded by the CMS detector at center of mass energy 13 TeV during the LHC Run 2.
LUX-ZEPLIN (LZ) is a direct detection dark matter experiment hosted in the Davis Campus of the Sanford Underground Research Facility in Lead, South Dakota. LZ’s central detector is a dual-phase time projection chamber containing 7 tonnes of liquid xenon (LXe), 5.6 tonne fiducial mass, and is aided by a LXe ”skin” detector and liquid scintillator-based outer detector to veto events inconsistent...
Results are presented from searches for the pair production of the lightest supersymmetric partner of the top quark (stop) targeting compressed scenarios, including four-body decays of the stop. The final states are challenging because of the low momentum of visible decay products. A variety of techniques, including multivariate approaches, are used to address the challenges. The results are...
Axion-like particles (ALPs) are at the forefront of physics research, especially at the intensity frontier, dealing with light weakly coupled particles. A plethora of different experiments searches for signals of the ALP in many different final states using innovative search strategies. We present a different perspective on ALP searches, concentrating on the modifications that such a particle...
The MicroBooNE collaboration recently released a series of measurements aimed at investigating the nature of the excess of low energy electromagnetic interactions observed by the MiniBooNE collaboration. In this talk, we will present the latest results from both a search of single photons in MicroBooNE, as well as a series of three independent analyses leveraging different reconstruction...
I review the deviations from the Standard Model predictions observed in low energy precision measurements. This includes the anomalous magnetic moment of the muon, semi-lepton B meson decays, the Cabibbo Angle anomaly, the mass of the W boson and searches for very high-energetic lepton pairs. I then discuss the implications of these anomalies for possible extensions of the Standard Model.
I discuss the use of Genetic Algorithms (GAs) as a search method in string theory. I will describe work showing that, despite intense recent developments in more conventional machine learning methods, GAs remain remarkably effective. Indeed comparison with Reinforcement Learning (RL) shows them to be in some respects superior. I also discuss how GAs and RL can be used in conjunction to make...
We discuss various approaches to the flavour problem of the Standard Model, including the LFU violation anomalies in B decays, in which the Yukawa couplings may be determined by symmetry or anarchy and may be renormalizable or effective. If the Yukawa couplings are effective, in principle the flavour scale can be anywhere from the Planck scale to the Electroweak scale, where SUSY/GUTs suggest...
The unprecedented collision energy of the LHC has opened up a new discovery regime. The first LHC dedicated search experiment, MoEDAL, has inaugurated the lifetime frontier being optimised for searches of long-lived particles. MoEDAL is designed to search highly ionising particle avatars of new physics, such as magnetic monopoles and dyons, using proton and heavy-ion collisions at the LHC. The...
In the Standard Model, the ground state of the Higgs field is not found at zero but instead corresponds to one of the degenerate solutions minimising the Higgs potential. In turn, this spontaneous electroweak symmetry breaking provides a mechanism for the mass generation of nearly all fundamental particles. While the Standard Model makes a definite prediction for the Higgs boson self-coupling...
We propose a new search strategy for higgsinos. Assuming associated production of higgsino-like pairs with a W or Z boson, we search in the missing energy plus hadronically-tagged vector boson channel. We place sensitivity limits for (HL-)LHC searches assuming O(1−3.5 GeV) mass differences between the lightest neutral and charged states. We point out that using the $E_T^\mathrm{miss}$...
Measurements of the fundamental properties of the Higgs boson are presented, including its mass, width, and the CP properties of its coupling in various production modes and decay channels.
One signature of an expanding universe is the time variation of the cosmological abundances of its different components. For example, a radiation-dominated universe inevitably gives way to a matter-dominated universe, and critical moments such as matter-radiation equality are fleeting. In this talk, I will stress that this lore is not always correct and that it is possible to obtain a form of...
Very detailed measurements of Higgs boson properties and its interactions can be performed with the full Run 2 pp collision dataset collected at 13 TeV, shining light over the electroweak symmetry breaking mechanism. This talk presents the latest measurements of the Higgs boson coupling properties by the ATLAS experiment in various decay bosonic and fermionic channels, as well as their...
Recent HL-LHC studies that were performed by CMS within Snowmass activities are presented. Updates cover different physics topics including also NP processes.
We study in detail the viability and the patterns of a strong first-order electroweak phase transition as a prerequisite to electroweak baryogenesis in the framework of $Z_3$-invariant Next-to-Minimal Supersymmetric Standard Model (NMSSM), in the light of recent experimental results from the Higgs sector, dark matter (DM) searches and those from the searches of the lighter chargino and...
The trilinear Higgs coupling $\lambda_{hhh}$ is a crucial tool to investigate the structure of the Higgs potential and to probe possible effects of physics beyond the Standard Model (SM). Focusing on the Two-Higgs-Doublet Model (2HDM) as a concrete example, I will discuss the calculation of the leading two-loop corrections to $\lambda_{hhh}$, and show that this coupling can be significantly...
Many theories beyond the Standard Model predict new phenomena, such as heavy vectors or scalar, vector-like quarks, and leptoquarks in final states containing bottom or top quarks. Such final states offer great potential to reduce the Standard Model background, although with significant challenges in reconstructing and identifying the decay products and modelling the remaining background. The...
We show that the type-I seesaw, responsible for generating the light neutrino mass, itself is capable of accommodating one of the three right handed neutrinos as a freeze-in type of dark matter (DM) where the required smallness of the associated coupling is connected to the lightness of the (smallest) active neutrino mass. It turns out that (a) the non-thermal production of DM having mass...
This talk presents a search for long-lived particles with the ATLAS detector at the LHC based on the full Run 2 dataset. Such particles would move slower than the speed of light and can be identified using their high transverse momenta and large specific ionisation losses (dE/dx). Using the dE/dx measurement from the pixel detector layer provides sensitivity to particles with lifetimes down to...
Commonly known as Boltzmann suppression is the key ingredient to create chemical imbalance for thermal dark matter. In a degenerate/quasi degenerate dark sector chemical imbalance can also be generated from a different mechanism which is analogous to the radioactive decay law, known as co-decaying dark matter. In this work, we have studied the dynamics of a multicomponent thermally decoupled...
Vector boson scattering is a key production process to probe the electroweak symmetry breaking of the standard model, since it involves both self-couplings of vector bosons and coupling with the Higgs boson. If the Higgs mechanism is not the sole source of electroweak symmetry breaking, the scattering amplitude deviates from the standard model prediction at high scattering energy. Moreover,...
Baryogenesis, the process that is theorised to have happened in the beginning of the Universe which produced the observed baryonic asymmetry, remains one of the most fundamental problems in physics. Baryon number violation (BNV) is ordinarily required for baryogenesis, but so far, all searches for it came back negative. The HIBEAM/NNBAR program is a two stage set of experiments (HIBEAM then...
We investigate in a conformally extended B−L scenario radiative plateau Higgs inflation while dynamically generating the Electroweak and Seesaw scale. The inflationary flat potential is a result of cancellations of quantum corrections between the gauge and Yukawa couplings. We show the theoretically consistent parameter space regions in LHC searches for this particle as well as in CMB.
...
A low reheating temperature is predicted by many supersymmetric extensions of the Standard Model. This implies that an extended early matter domination era (eMD) might have occurred in the universe during the first seconds of the cosmic evolution. In this talk I will present how the density perturbations grow and primordial black holes (PBHs) can form during eMD. Emphasis will be given to the...
Obtaining precise theoretical predictions for both production and decay processes of heavy new particles is of paramount importance to constrain the allowed parameter space of BSM models and to properly assess the sensitivity for discoveries and for discriminating between different BSM scenarios. In this context, it is well known that large logarithmic corrections can appear in the presence of...
Studying the properties of the Higgs boson can be an important window to explore the physics beyond the Standard Model. In this work, we present studies on the implications of the Higgs precision measurements at future Higgs Factories on various types of two Higgs Doublet Models. We perform a global fit to various Higgs search channels to obtain the 95% C.L. constraints on the model parameter...
The Sachdev-Ye-Kitaev (SYK) model is a quantum mechanical model that is strongly interacting, chaotic and solvable. It is known to have a gravity dual and exhibit black hole
physics. Recently, a sparse version of SYK was proposed. These sparse SYK models can be obtained by randomly pruning the couplings of the all-to-all SYK or defined by random regular hypergraphs. The sparsity makes...
We investigate the impact of Coleman-Weinberg inflation on the stochastic gravitational wave background spectrum emitted by intermediate-scale cosmic strings. The string network is partially inflated and reenters the horizon at later times after the end of inflation, such that the short string loops are not produced. This leads to a significant modification of the gravitational wave spectrum...
