Speaker
Prof.
Wai-Yee Keung
(University of Illinois at Chicago)
Description
Goldstone bosons arising from the spontaneous breakdown of some global hidden symmetries can interact weakly in the early Universe and account for a fraction of the effective number of neutrino species $N_{eff}$, which has been reported persistently 1 $\sigma$ away from its expected value of three. In this work, we study in some details a number of experimental constraints on this interesting idea based on the simplest possibility of a global $U(1)$, as studied by Weinberg. We work out the decay branching ratios of the associated light scalar field σ and suggest a possible collider signature at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC). In some corners of the parameter space, the scalar field \sigma can decay into a pair of pions with a branching ratio of order O(1)% while the rest is mostly a pair of Goldstone bosons. The collider signature would be gluon fusion into the standard model Higgs boson $gg \to H$ or associated production with a $W$ gauge boson $q \bar{q}'\to H W$, followed by $H \to \sigma \sigma \to (\pi\pi) (\alpha\alpha)$, where $\alpha$ is the Goldstone boson.
We calculate the energy loss rates through the emission of these Goldstone bosons in a post-collapse supernova core. Invoking the well established emissivity bound from the Supernova 1987A observations and simulations, we find that nuclear bremsstrahlung processes can notably impose a bound on the Goldstone boson coupling to the Standard Model Higgs, g, dependent on the mass of the associated radial field, mr. For mr large enough compared with the temperature in the post-collapse supernova core, our bound is $|g|≲0.011(m_r/500 {\rm\ MeV})^2$, very competitive to that derived from collider experiments.
Author
Prof.
Wai-Yee Keung
(University of Illinois at Chicago)
