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Archil Kobakhidze

Publications and source records attributed to Archil Kobakhidze.

At least 37 records · Page 2Linked to original sources
arXiv2020

Thermal dark matter abundance under non-standard macroscopic conditions in the early universe

The standard theoretical estimation of the thermal dark matter abundance may be significantly altered if properties of dark matter particles in the early universe and at the present cosmological epoch differ. This may happen if, e.g., a cosmological phase existed in the early universe during which dark matter particles were temporarily unstable and their abundance was reduced through their decays. We argue that a large class of microscopic theories which are rejected due to the dark matter overproduction, may actually be viable theories if certain macroscopic conditions were satisfied in the early universe. We explicitly demonstrate our mechanism within the minimal supersymmetric standard model with the bino-like lightest supersymmetric particle being a phenomenologically viable dark matter candidate under the condition that the early universe carried a global R-charge which induced the instability phase.

hep-ph↗
arXiv2020

Gravitational Instabilities of the Cosmic Neutrino Background with Non-zero Lepton Number

We argue that a cosmic neutrino background that carries non-zero lepton charge develops gravitational instabilities. Fundamentally, these instabilities are related to the mixed gravity-lepton number anomaly. We have explicitly computed the gravitational Chern-Simons term which is generated quantum-mechanically in the effective action in the presence of a lepton number asymmetric neutrino background. The induced Chern-Simons term has a twofold effect: (i) gravitational waves propagating in such a neutrino background exhibit birefringent behaviour leading to an enhancement/suppression of the gravitational wave amplitudes depending on the polarisation, where the magnitude of this effect is related to the size of the lepton asymmetry; (ii) Negative energy graviton modes are induced in the high frequency regime, which leads to very fast vacuum decay producing, e.g., positive energy photons and negative energy gravitons. From the constraint on the present radiation energy density, we obtain an interesting bound on the lepton asymmetry of the universe.

hep-ph↗
arXiv2019

Supersymmetric Naturalness Beyond MSSM

The experiments at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) have pushed the limits on masses of supersymmetric particles beyond the $\sim$TeV scale. This compromises naturalness of the simplest supersymmetric extension of the Standard Model, the minimal supersymmetric Standard Model (MSSM). In this paper we advocate that perhaps the current experimental data are actually hinting towards the physics beyond MSSM. To illustrate this, we treat MSSM as a low energy limit of a more fundamental yet unspecified theory at a scale $Λ$, and compute the fine-tuning measure $Δ$ for generic boundary conditions on soft SUSY breaking parameters and various cut-off scales. As a general trend we observe reduction in fine-tuning together with lowering $Λ$. In particular, perfectly natural [$Δ\lesssim \mathcal{O}(10)$] theories with a multi-TeV spectrum of supersymmetric particles and consistent with all current observations can be obtained for $Λ\sim \mathcal{O}(100)$TeV. The lowering of the fine-tuning for large cut-off scales can also be observed in theories exhibiting special quasi-fixed point behaviours of parameters. Our observations call for a more throughout exploration of possible alternative ultraviolet completions of MSSM.

hep-ph↗
arXiv2019

A brief remark on convexity of effective potentials and de Sitter Swampland conjectures

Recently proposed de Sitter Swampland conjectures imply non-trivial constraints on a scalar field potential in any effective field theory that admits a quantum gravity completion. The original conjecture apparently excludes many phenomenologically motivated scalar potentials with de Sitter extrema, such as the perturbative Standard Model Higgs potential and the QCD axion potential, as the viable low-energy theories. Subsequently, the refined, weaker conjecture was proposed. However, the full effective potential, having been defined as a Legendre transform, is necessarily convex. This ensures that the original Swampland conjecture can actually be satisfied in phenomenologically relevant models, providing no de Sitter vacua exist.

physics.gen-ph↗
arXiv2018

More stringent constraints on the unitarised fermionic dark matter Higgs portal

We revisit the simplest model of Higgs portal fermionic dark matter. The dark matter in this scenario is thermally produced in the early universe due to the interactions with the Higgs boson which is described by a non-renormalisable dimension-5 operator. The dark matter-Higgs scattering amplitude grows as $\propto \sqrt{s}$, signalling a breakdown of the effective description of the Higgs-dark matter interactions at large enough (compared to the mass scale $Λ$ of the dimention-5 operator) energies. Therefore, in order to reliably compute Higgs-dark matter scattering cross sections, we employ the K-matrix unitarisation procedure. To account for the desired dark matter abundance, the unitarised theory requires appreaciably smaller $Λ$ than the non-unitarised version, especially for dark matter masses around and below the Higgs resonance, $m_χ\lesssim 65$ GeV, and $m_χ\gtrsim $ few TeV. Consequently, we find that the pure scalar CP-conserving model is fully excluded by current direct dark matter detection experiments.

hep-ph↗
arXiv2018

Mechanism for dark matter depopulation

Early decoupling of thermally produced dark matter particles due to feeble interactions with the surrounding plasma typically results in their excessive abundance. In this work we propose a simple mechanism for dark matter depopulation. It relies on a specific cosmological evolution under which dark matter particles become temporarily unstable and hence decay away reducing the overall abundance. The instability phase may be followed by an incomplete regeneration phase until the final abundance is established. We explicitly demonstrate this mechanism within a simple toy model of fermionic dark matter and discuss how it can be implemented in theoretically well motivated theories, such as the minimal supersymmetric standard model (MSSM) and for fermionic dark matter in the scotogenic model.

hep-ph↗
arXiv2018

Electroweak monopoles and electroweak baryogenesis

We describe electroweak monopoles within the Born-Infeld extension of $SU(2)_L\times U(1)_Y$ electroweak theory. We argue for topological stability of these monopoles and computed their mass in terms of the Born-Infeld mass parameters. We then propose a new mechanism for electroweak baryogenesis which takes advantage of the following salient features of the electroweak monopoles: (i) monopoles support extra CP violation in the topological sector of the electroweak theory; (ii) they mediate unsuppressed baryon number violating interactions; (iii) non-thermal production of monopoles during the electroweak phase transitions generates departure from thermal equilibrium. We demonstrate that the observed baryon asymmetry of the universe can be explained in our theory in the presence of electroweak monopoles of mass $M\sim 10^{4}$ TeV.

hep-ph↗
arXiv2018

Exotic Lepton Searches via Bound State Production at the LHC

Heavy long-lived multi-charged leptons (MCLs) are predicted by various new physics models. These hypothetical MCLs can form bound states, due to their high electric charges and long life times. In this work, we propose a novel strategy of searching for MCLs through their bound state productions and decays. By utilizing LHC-8 TeV data in searching for resonances in the diphoton channel, we exclude the masses of isospin singlet heavy leptons with electric charge $|q|\geq 6$ (in units of electron charge) lower than $\sim$1.2 TeV, which are much stronger than the corresponding 8 TeV LHC bounds from analysing the high ionisation and the long time-of-flight of MCLs. By utilising the current 13 TeV LHC diphoton channel measurements the bound can further exclude MCL masses up to $\sim$1.6 TeV for $|q|\geq 6$. Also, we demonstrate that the conventional LHC limits from searching for MCLs produced via Drell-Yan processes can be enhanced by including the contribution of photon fusion processes.

hep-ph↗
arXiv2017

Warped Graviton Couplings to Bulk Vectors with Brane Localised Kinetic Terms

We realize non-universal couplings between Kaluza-Klein (KK) gravitons and bulk Standard Model (SM) vectors in the Randall-Sundrum (RS) model by including both UV and IR brane-localised gauge kinetic terms. We find that such kinetic terms can reduce the couplings of KK gravitons to SM gauge bosons and also ensure the KK vector masses are consistent with electroweak precision constraints.

hep-ph↗
arXiv2017

Gravitational waves from a supercooled electroweak phase transition and their detection with pulsar timing arrays

We investigate the properties of a stochastic gravitational wave background produced by a first-order electroweak phase transition in the regime of extreme supercooling. We study a scenario whereby the percolation temperature that signifies the completion of the transition, $T_p$, can be as low as a few MeV (nucleosynthesis temperature), while most of the true vacuum bubbles are formed much earlier at the nucleation temperature, $T_n\sim 50$ GeV. This implies that the gravitational wave spectrum is mainly produced by the collisions of large bubbles and characterised by a large amplitude and a peak frequency as low as $f \sim 10^{-9}-10^{-7}$ Hz. We show that such a scenario can occur in (but not limited to) a model based on a non-linear realisation of the electroweak gauge group, such that the Higgs vacuum configuration is altered by a cubic coupling. In order to carefully quantify the evolution of the phase transition of this model over such a wide temperature range, we go beyond the usual fast transition approximation, taking into account the expansion of the Universe as well as the behaviour of the nucleation probability at low temperatures. Our computation shows that there exists a range of parameters for which the gravitational wave spectrum lies at the edge between the exclusion limits of current pulsar timing array experiments and the detection band of the future Square Kilometre Array observatory.

hep-ph↗
arXiv2017

Low temperature electroweak phase transition in the Standard Model with hidden scale invariance

We discuss a cosmological phase transition within the Standard Model which incorporates spontaneously broken scale invariance as a low-energy theory. In addition to the Standard Model fields, the minimal model involves a light dilaton, which acquires a large vacuum expectation value (VEV) through the mechanism of dimensional transmutation. Under the assumption of the cancellation of the vacuum energy, the dilaton develops a very small mass at 2-loop order. As a result, a flat direction is present in the classical dilaton-Higgs potential at zero temperature while the quantum potential admits two (almost) degenerate local minima with unbroken and broken eletroweak symmetry. We found that the cosmological electroweak phase transition in this model can only be triggered by a QCD chiral symmetry breaking phase transition at low temperatures, $T\lesssim 132$ MeV. Furthermore, unlike the standard case, the universe settles into the chiral symmetry breaking vacuum via a first-order phase transition which gives rise to a stochastic gravitational background with a peak frequency $\sim 10^{-8}$ Hz as well as triggers the production of approximately solar mass primordial black holes. The observation of these signatures of cosmological phase transitions together with the detection of a light dilaton would provide a strong hint of the fundamental role of scale invariance in particle physics.

hep-ph↗
arXiv2017

Scale Invariant Top Condensate

We propose a scale invariant model of dynamical electroweak symmetry breaking via top condensation within the minimal top condensate see-saw model. The classical scale invariance is realized nonlinearly by introducing conformal compensator scalar field, the dilaton, which plays crucial role in successful predictions for the Higgs boson. The dilaton mass and its mixing with the composite Higgs boson appears only at 2-loop level, both being proportional to the hierarchy between the electroweak and compositeness scales, $\propto v/Λ$. The mass scales in our model are generated via the mechanism of dimensional transmutation and the hierarchy $v/Λ\ll 1$ is radiatively stable, thus resolving the fine-tuning problem of the standard top condensate models.

hep-ph↗
arXiv2017

Probing the MSSM explanation of the muon g-2 anomaly in dark matter experiments and at a 100 TeV $pp$ collider

We explore the ability of current and future dark matter and collider experiments in probing anomalous magnetic moment of the muon, $(g-2)_μ$, within the Minimal Supersymmetric Standard Model (MSSM). We find that the latest PandaX-II/LUX-2016 data gives a strong constraint on parameter space that accommodates the $(g-2)_μ$ within $2σ$ range, which will be further excluded by the upcoming XENON-1T (2017) experiment. We also find that a 100 TeV $pp$ collider can cover most of our surviving samples that satisfy DM relic density within $3σ$ range through $Z$ or $h$ resonant effect by searching for trilepton events from $\tildeχ^0_2\tildeχ^+_1$ associated production. While the samples that are beyond future sensitivity of trilepton search at a 100 TeV $pp$ collider and the DM direct detections are either higgsino/wino-like LSPs or bino-like LSPs co-annihilating with sleptons. Such compressed regions may be covered by the monojet(-like) searches at a 100 TeV $pp$ collider.

hep-ph↗
arXiv2017

Electroweak monopoles and the electroweak phase transition

We consider an isolated electroweak monopole solution within the Standard Model with a non-linear Born-Infeld extension of the hypercharge gauge field. Monopole (and dyon) solutions in such an extension are regular and their masses are predicted to be proportional to the Born-Infeld mass parameter. We argue that cosmological production of electroweak monopoles may delay the electroweak phase transition and make it more strongly first order for monopole masses $M\gtrsim 9.3\cdot 10^3$ TeV, while the nucleosynthesis constraints on the abundance of relic monopoles impose the bound $M\lesssim 2.3\cdot 10^4$ TeV. The monopoles with a mass in this shallow range may be responsible for the dynamical generation of the matter-antimatter asymmetry during the electroweak phase transition.

hep-ph↗
arXiv2017

Standard Model with hidden scale invariance and light dilaton

We consider the minimal Standard Model as an effective low-energy description of an unspecified fundamental theory with spontaneously broken conformal symmetry. The effective theory exhibits classical scale invariance which manifest itself through the dilaton field. The mass of the dilaton is generated via the quantum scale anomaly at two-loop level and is proportional to the techically stable hierarchy between the electroweak scale and a high energy scale given by a dilaton vacuum expectation value. We find that a generic prediction of this class of models is the existence of a very light dilaton with mass between $\sim 0.01$ $μ$eV to $\sim 100$ MeV, depending on the hierarchy of scales. Searches for such a light scalar particle may reveal a fundamental role of conformal invariance in nature.

hep-ph↗
arXiv2016

Implications of CP-violating Top-Higgs Couplings at LHC and Higgs Factories

We utilise the LHC Run-1 and -2 Higgs data to constrain the CP-violating top-Higgs couplings. In order to satisfy the current full Higgs data sets at $2σ$ level, the CP-odd component $C^p_t$ and the CP-even component $C^s_t$ have to be within the ranges $|C^p_t|< 0.37$ and $0.85 <C^s_t< 1.20$, respectively, which is stronger than the LHC Run-1 bound $|C^p_t|< 0.54$ and $0.68 <C^s_t< 1.20$. With the new bound, we explore the impact on the CP-violating top-Higgs couplings in the Higgs production processes $pp \to t\bar{t}h, thj, hh$ at 13 TeV LHC, and $e^+e^- \to hZ, hγ$ at future 240 GeV Higgs factories. We find that the cross sections of $pp \to t\bar{t}h$, $pp \to thj$, $pp \to hh$, $e^+e^- \to hZ$ and $e^+e^- \to hγ$ can be enhanced up to 1.41, 1.18, 2.20, 1.001 and 1.09 times as large as the SM predictions, respectively. The future precision measurement of the process $e^+e^- \to hγ$ with an accuracy of 5\% will be able to constrain $|C^p_t|<0.19$ at most at a 240 GeV $e^+e^-$ Higgs factory.

hep-ph↗
arXiv2016

Constraining non-commutative space-time from GW150914

The gravitational wave signal GW150914, recently detected by LIGO and Virgo collaborations, is used to place a bound on the scale of quantum fuzziness of non-commutative space-time. We show that the leading non-commutative correction to the phase of the gravitational waves produced by a binary system appears at the 2nd order of the post- Newtonian expansion. This correction is proportional to $Λ^2 \equiv |θ^{0i}|^2/(l_P t_P)^2$, where $θ^{μν}$ is the antisymmetric tensor of non-commutativity. To comply with GW150914 data, we find that $\sqrtΛ \lesssim 6$, namely less than one order of magnitude above the Planck scale. This is the most stringent bound on non-commutative scale, exceeding the previous constraints from particle physics processes by $\sim 15$ orders of magnitude.

gr-qc↗