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Andreas Weiler

Publications and source records attributed to Andreas Weiler.

At least 55 records · Page 3Linked to original sources

Strong Signatures of Right-Handed Compositeness

Right-handed light quarks could be significantly composite, yet compatible with experimental searches at the LHC and precision tests on Standard Model couplings. In these scenarios, that are motivated by flavor physics, one expects large cross sections for the production of new resonances coupled to light quarks. We study experimental strong signatures of right-handed compositeness at the LHC, and constrain the parameter space of these models with recent results by ATLAS and CMS. We show that the LHC sensitivity could be significantly improved if dedicated searches were performed, in particular in multi-jet signals.

hep-ph↗

Constraining the dipole moments of the top quark

We investigate the direct and indirect bounds on dipole operators involving the top quark. A careful analysis shows that the experimental upper limit on the neutron electric dipole moment strongly constrains the chromo-electric dipole of the top. We improve previous bounds by two orders of magnitude. This has significant implications for new physics models and it also means that CP violation in top pair production mediated by dipole operators will not be accessible at the LHC. The CP conserving chromo-magnetic dipole moments are constrained by recent measurements of the t\bar t spectrum by the ATLAS collaboration. We also update the indirect constraints on electric and magnetic dipole moments from radiative b -> s transitions, finding that they can be considerably larger than their colored counterparts.

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Light non-degenerate squarks at the LHC

Experimental bounds on squarks of the first two generations assume their masses to be eightfold degenerate, and consequently constrain them to be heavier than ~ 1.4 TeV when the gluino is lighter than 2.5 TeV. The assumption of squark-mass universality is neither a direct consequence of Minimal Flavor Violation (MFV), which allows for splittings within squark generations, nor a prediction of supersymmetric alignment models, which allow for splittings between generations. We reinterpret a recent CMS multijet plus missing energy search allowing for deviations from U(2) universality, and show that the squark bounds are significantly weakened: a 400 GeV second-generation squark singlet is allowed, even with exclusive decays to a massless neutralino; and in an MFV scenario, the down-type squark singlets can be as light as 600 GeV provided the up-type singlets are pushed up to 1.8 TeV, for a 1.5 TeV gluino and decoupled doublet squarks.

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Summary of the Electroweak and Searches Working Group

The working group on electroweak measurements and searches for new physics at the Deep Inelastic Scattering 2012 workshop covered a wide range of results from the various experiments at the LHC (ATLAS, CMS, LHCb), the Tevatron (CDF, DO) and HERA (H1, ZEUS), as well as results from the BaBar, NA48/62 and OPERA collaborations. In addition, invited theoretical overviews were presented and discussed in each of the sessions. A summary of a selection of the results shown at the conference is given.

hep-ex↗

If no Higgs then what?

In the absence of a Higgs boson, the perturbative description of the Standard Model ceases to make sense above a TeV. Heavy spin-1 fields coupled to W and Z bosons can extend the validity of the theory up to higher scales. We carefully identify regions of parameter space where a minimal addition - a single spin-1 custodial SU(2) triplet resonance - allows one to retain perturbative control in all channels. Elastic scattering of longitudinal W and Z bosons alone seems to permit a very large cut-off beyond the Naive Dimensional Analysis expectation. We find however that including scattering of the spin-1 resonances then leads to an earlier onset of strong coupling. Most importantly for LHC searches, we define a self-consistent set-up with a well-defined range of validity without recourse to unitarization schemes whose physical meaning is obscure. We discuss the LHC phenomenology and the discovery reach for these electroweak resonances and mention the possibility of a nightmare scenario with no Higgs nor resonance within the LHC reach. Finally, we discuss the effects of parity breaking in the heavy resonance sector which reduces the contributions to the S parameter.

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Natural SUSY Endures

The first 1/fb of LHC searches have set impressive limits on new colored particles decaying to missing energy. We address the implication of these searches for naturalness in supersymmetry (SUSY). General bottom-up considerations of natural electroweak symmetry breaking show that higgsinos, stops, and the gluino should not be too far above the weak scale. The rest of the spectrum, including the squarks of the first two generations, can be heavier and beyond the current LHC reach. We have used collider simulations to determine the limits that all of the 1/fb searches pose on higgsinos, stops, and the gluino. We find that stops and the left-handed sbottom are starting to be constrained and must be heavier than about 200-300 GeV when decaying to higgsinos. The gluino must be heavier than about 600-800 GeV when it decays to stops and sbottoms. While these findings point toward scenarios with a lighter third generation split from the other squarks, we do find that moderately-tuned regions remain, where the gluino is just above 1 TeV and all the squarks are degenerate and light. Among all the searches, jets plus missing energy and same-sign dileptons often provide the most powerful probes of natural SUSY. Overall, our results indicate that natural SUSY has survived the first 1/fb of data. The LHC is now on the brink of exploring the most interesting region of SUSY parameter space.

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Rare and CP-Violating K and B Decays in the Littlest Higgs Model with T-Parity

We calculate the most interesting rare and CP-violating K and B decays in the Littlest Higgs model with T-parity. We give a collection of Feynman rules including v^2/f^2 contributions that are presented here for the first time and could turn out to be useful also for applications outside flavour physics. We adopt a model-independent parameterization of rare decays in terms of the gauge independent functions X_i,Y_i,Z_i (i=K,d,s), which is in particular useful for the study of the breaking of the universality between K, B_d and B_s systems through non-MFV interactions. Performing the calculation in the unitary and 't Hooft-Feynman gauge, we find that the final result contains a divergence which signals some sensitivity to the ultraviolet completion of the theory. Including an estimate of this contribution, we calculate the branching ratios for the decays $K^+\toπ^+ν\barν$, $K_L\toπ^0ν\barν$, $B_{s,d}\to μ^+μ^-$, $B\to X_{s,d}ν\barν$, $K_L \toπ^0\ell^+\ell^-$ and $B\to X_{s,d}\ell^+\ell^-$, paying particular attention to non-MFV contributions present in the model. Imposing all available constraints we find that the decay rates for $B_{s,d} \to μ^+ μ^-$ and $B \to X_{s,d} ν\bar ν$ can be enhanced by at most 50% and 35% relative to the SM values, while $Br(K^+\toπ^+ν\barν)$ and $Br(K_L\toπ^0ν\barν)$ can be both as high as $5 \cdot 10^{-10}$. Significant enhancements of the decay rates $K_L \toπ^0\ell^+\ell^-$ are also possible. Simultaneously, the CP-asymmetries $S_{ψϕ}$ and $A^s_\text{SL}$ can be enhanced by an order of magnitude, while the electroweak penguin effects in $B \to πK$ turn out to be small, in agreement with the recent data.

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Charming Higgs

We present a simple supersymmetric model where the dominant decay mode of the lightest Higgs boson is h->2eta->4c where eta is a light pseudoscalar and c is the charm quark. For such decays the Higgs mass can be smaller than 100 GeV without conflict with experiment. Together with the fact that both the Higgs and the pseudoscalar eta are pseudo-Goldstone bosons, this resolves the little hierarchy problem.

hep-ph↗

Buried Higgs

We present an extension of the MSSM where the dominant decay channel of the Higgs boson is a cascade decay into a four-gluon final state. In this model the Higgs is a pseudo-Goldstone boson of a broken global symmetry SU(3)-> SU(2). Both the global symmetry breaking and electroweak symmetry breaking are radiatively induced. The global symmetry breaking pattern also implies the existence of a light (few GeV) pseudo-Goldstone boson eta which is a singlet under the standard model gauge group. The h -> eta eta branching fraction is large, and typically dominates over the standard h -> b b decay. The dominant decay of eta is into two gluons, while the decays to photons, taus or lighter standard model flavors are suppressed at the level of 10^(-4) or more. With h-> 4 jets as the dominant decay, the Higgs could be as light as 78 GeV without being detected at LEP, while detection at the LHC is extremely challenging. However many of the super- and global symmetry partners of the standard model particles should be easily observable at the LHC. Furthermore, the LHC should be able to observe a "wrong Higgs" that is a 300-400 GeV heavy Higgs-like particle with suppressed couplings to W and Z that by itself does not account for electroweak precision observables and the unitarity of WW scattering. At the same time, the true Higgs is deeply buried in the QCD background.

hep-ph↗

Flavor Alignment via Shining in RS

We present a class of warped extra dimensional models whose flavor violating interactions are much suppressed compared to the usual anarchic case due to flavor alignment. Such suppression can be achieved in models where part of the global flavor symmetry is gauged in the bulk and broken in a controlled manner. We show that the bulk masses can be aligned with the down type Yukawa couplings by an appropriate choice of bulk flavon field representations and TeV brane dynamics. This alignment could reduce the flavor violating effects to levels which allow for a Kaluza-Klein scale as low as 2-3 TeV, making the model observable at the LHC. However, the up-type Yukawa couplings on the IR brane, which are bounded from below by recent bounds on CP violation in the D system, induce flavor misalignment radiatively. Off-diagonal down-type Yukawa couplings and kinetic mixings for the down quarks are both consequences of this effect. These radiative Yukawa corrections can be reduced by raising the flavon VEV on the IR brane (at the price of some moderate tuning), or by extending the Higgs sector. The flavor changing effects from the radiatively induced Yukawa mixing terms are at around the current upper experimental bounds. We also show the generic bounds on UV-brane induced flavor violating effects, and comment on possible additional flavor violations from bulk flavor gauge bosons and the bulk Yukawa scalars.

hep-ph↗

Polarized Tops from Stop Decays at the LHC

In supersymmetric models, scalar top quarks, or stops, generically have parity-violating couplings to top quarks. As a result, tops produced in stop decays should be polarized. In this paper, we will argue that this effect may be observable at the LHC with realistic integrated luminosities, provided that one of the stops is copiously produced and can decay to a top and a neutralino. We define the "effective" stop mixing angle, which determines the degree of top polarization, and discuss the prospects for a measurement of this angle at the LHC. If some information about the neutralino mixing matrix is available, this measurement can be used to constrain the mixing angle in the stop sector, one of the most important ingredients in assessing the naturalness of electroweak symmetry breaking in the MSSM.

hep-ph↗

Delta F=2 Observables and Fine-Tuning in a Warped Extra Dimension with Custodial Protection

We present a complete study of Delta S = 2 and Delta B = 2 processes in a warped extra dimensional model with a custodial protection of Z b_L bar b_L, including epsilon_K, Delta M_K, Delta M_s, Delta M_d, A^q_SL, Delta Gamma_q, A_CP(B_d -> psi K_S) and A_CP(B_s -> psi phi). These processes are affected by tree level contributions from Kaluza-Klein gluons, the heavy KK photon, new heavy electroweak gauge bosons Z_H and Z', and in principle by tree level Z contributions. We confirm recent findings that the fully anarchic approach where all the hierarchies in quark masses and weak mixing angles are geometrically explained seems implausible and we confirm that the KK mass scale M_KK generically has to be at least ~20TeV to satisfy the epsilon_K constraint. We point out, however, that there exist regions in parameter space with only modest fine-tuning in the 5D Yukawa couplings which satisfy all existing Delta F = 2 and electroweak precision constraints for scales M_KK ~3TeV in reach of the LHC. Simultaneously we find that A_CP(B_s -> psi phi) and A^s_SL can be much larger than in the SM as indicated by recent results from CDF and D0 data. We point out that for B_{d,s} physics Delta F = 2 observables the complex (Z_H,Z') can compete with KK gluons, while the tree level Z and KK photon contributions are very small. In particular we point out that the Z d^i_L bar d^j_L couplings are protected by the custodial symmetry. As a by-product we show the relation of the RS flavour model to the Froggatt-Nielsen mechanism and we provide analytic formulae for the effective flavour mixing matrices in terms of the fundamental 5D parameters.

hep-ph↗

A Simple Flavor Protection for RS

We present a simple variation of warped flavor models where the hierarchies of fermion masses and mixings are still explained but dangerous flavor violating effects in the Kaon sector are greatly reduced. The key new ingredients are two horizontal U(1) symmetries. These symmetries forbid flavor violation in the down quark sector (with the exception of small IR brane localized kinetic mixing terms for the left-handed quarks) while allowing for flavor violation in the up quark sector. The leading flavor constraints come from D - anti-D mixing, and are safely satisfied for the KK mass scale of order 3 TeV. Our analysis of the flavor constraints also includes the constraints due to the (usually ignored) localized kinetic mixing terms. We also comment on the effects of the additional U(1) gauge bosons.

hep-ph↗

The Flavor of the Composite Pseudo-Goldstone Higgs

We study the flavor structure of 5D warped models that provide a dual description of a composite pseudo-Goldstone Higgs. We first carefully re-examine the flavor constraints on the mass scale of new physics in the standard Randall-Sundrum-type scenarios, and find that the KK gluon mass should generically be heavier than about 21 TeV. We then compare the flavor structure of the composite Higgs models to those in the RS model. We find new contributions to flavor violation, which while still are suppressed by the RS-GIM mechanism, will enhance the amplitudes of flavor violations. In particular, there is a kinetic mixing term among the SM fields which (although parametrically not enhanced) will make the flavor bounds even more stringent than in RS. This together with the fact that in the pseudo-Goldstone scenario Yukawa couplings are set by a gauge coupling implies the KK gluon mass to be at least about 33 TeV. For both the RS and the composite Higgs models the flavor bounds could be stronger or weaker depending on the assumption on the value of the gluon boundary kinetic term. These strong bounds seem to imply that the fully anarchic approach to flavor in warped extra dimensions is implausible, and there have to be at least some partial flavor symmetries appearing that eliminate part of the sources for flavor violation. We also present complete expressions for the radiatively generated Higgs potential of various 5D implementations of the composite Higgs model, and comment on the 1-5 percent level tuning needed in the top sector to achieve a phenomenologically acceptable vacuum state.

hep-ph↗

Determining the Sign of the Z-Penguin Amplitude

We point out that the precision measurements of the pseudo observables R_b^0, A_b, and A_FB^0,b performed at LEP and SLC suggest that in models with minimal-flavor-violation the sign of the Z-penguin amplitude is identical to the one present in the standard model. We determine the allowed range for the non-standard contribution to the Inami-Lim function C and show by analyzing possible scenarios with positive and negative interference of standard model and new physics contributions, that the derived bound holds in each given case. Finally, we derive lower and upper limits for the branching ratios of K^+ -> pi^+ nu nubar, K_L -> pi^0 nu nubar, K_L -> mu^+ mu^-, B -> X_d,s nu nubar, and B_d,s -> mu^+ mu^- within constrained minimal-flavor-violation making use of the wealth of available data collected at the Z-pole.

hep-ph↗

Bound on minimal universal extra dimensions from Bbar -> X_s gamma

We reexamine the constraints on universal extra dimensional models arising from the inclusive radiative Bbar -> X_s gamma decay. We take into account the leading order contributions due to the exchange of Kaluza-Klein modes as well as the available next-to-next-to-leading order corrections to the Bbar -> X_s gamma branching ratio in the standard model. For the case of one large flat universal extra dimension, we obtain a lower bound on the inverse compactification radius 1/R > 600 GeV at 95% confidence level that is independent of the Higgs mass.

hep-ph↗

Another Look at Minimal Lepton Flavour Violation, l_i -> l_j gamma, Leptogenesis, and the Ratio M_nu/ Lambda_LFV

We analyze lepton flavour violation (LFV), as well as generation of the observed baryon-antibaryon asymmetry of the Universe (BAU) within a generalized minimal lepton flavour violation (MLFV) framework where we allow for CP violation both at low and high energies. The generation of BAU is obtained through radiative resonant leptogenesis (RRL), where starting with three exactly degenerate right-handed neutrinos at Lambda_GUT, we demonstrate explicitly within the SM and the MSSM that the splittings between their masses at the see-saw scale M_nu, generated by renormalization group effects, are sufficient for a successful leptogenesis for M_nu even as low as 10^6 GeV. The inclusion of flavour effects plays an important role in this result and can lead to the observed BAU even in the absence of CP violation beyond the PMNS phases. The absence of a stringent lower bound on M_nu in this type of leptogenesis allows to easily satisfy present and near future upper bounds on mu -> e gamma and other charged lepton flavour violating (LFV) processes even for Lambda_LFV = O(1 TeV). We find, that the MLFV framework in the presence of heavy right-handed neutrinos and leptogenesis is not as predictive as MFV in the quark sector and point out that without a specific MLFV model, there is a rich spectrum of possibilities for charged LFV processes and for their correlation with low energy neutrino physics and the LHC physics, even if the constraint from the observed BAU is taken into account. While certain qualitative features of our analysis confirm findings of Cirigliano et al., at the quantitative level we find phenomenologically important differences. We explain the origin of these differences.

hep-ph↗

Another Look at the Flavour Structure of the Littlest Higgs Model with T-Parity

We discuss the mixing matrix V_Hd that describes the charged and neutral current interactions between ordinary down-quarks and up- and down-mirror quarks in the Littlest Higgs Model with T-parity (LHT). We point out that this matrix in addition to three mixing angles contains three physical complex phases and not only one as used in the present literature. We explain the reason for the presence of two additional phases, propose a new standard parameterization of V_Hd and briefly comment on the relevance of these new phases for the phenomenology of FCNC processes in the LHT model. In a separate paper we present a detailed numerical analysis, including these new phases, of K and B physics, with particular attention to the most interesting rare decays.

hep-ph↗