arXiv subjects
Publications and source records attributed to D. Guadagnoli.
This report details the capabilities of LHCb and its upgrades towards the study of kaons and hyperons. The analyses performed so far are reviewed, elaborating on the prospects for some key decay channels, while proposing some new measurements in LHCb to expand its strangeness research program.
We present the activities of the `New Physics' working group for the `Physics at TeV Colliders' workshop (Les Houches, France, 5--23 June, 2017). Our report includes new physics studies connected with the Higgs boson and its properties, direct search strategies, reinterpretation of the LHC results in the building of viable models and new computational tool developments.
We present the activities of the "New Physics" working group for the "Physics at TeV Colliders" workshop (Les Houches, France, 3--21 June, 2013). Our report includes new computational tool developments, studies of the implications of the Higgs boson discovery on new physics, important signatures for searches for natural new physics at the LHC, new studies of flavour aspects of new physics, and assessments of the interplay between direct dark matter searches and the LHC.
During 2011 the LHCb experiment at CERN collected 1.0 fb-1 of sqrt{s} = 7 TeV pp collisions. Due to the large heavy quark production cross-sections, these data provide unprecedented samples of heavy flavoured hadrons. The first results from LHCb have made a significant impact on the flavour physics landscape and have definitively proved the concept of a dedicated experiment in the forward region at a hadron collider. This document discusses the implications of these first measurements on classes of extensions to the Standard Model, bearing in mind the interplay with the results of searches for on-shell production of new particles at ATLAS and CMS. The physics potential of an upgrade to the LHCb detector, which would allow an order of magnitude more data to be collected, is emphasised.
We present the activities of the "New Physics" working group for the "Physics at TeV Colliders" workshop (Les Houches, France, 30 May-17 June, 2011). Our report includes new agreements on formats for interfaces between computational tools, new tool developments, important signatures for searches at the LHC, recommendations for presentation of LHC search results, as well as additional phenomenological studies.
We present a set of recommendations for the presentation of LHC results on searches for new physics, which are aimed at providing a more efficient flow of scientific information between the experimental collaborations and the rest of the high energy physics community, and at facilitating the interpretation of the results in a wide class of models. Implementing these recommendations would aid the full exploitation of the physics potential of the LHC.
One of the major challenges of particle physics has been to gain an in-depth understanding of the role of quark flavor and measurements and theoretical interpretations of their results have advanced tremendously: apart from masses and quantum numbers of flavor particles, there now exist detailed measurements of the characteristics of their interactions allowing stringent tests of Standard Model predictions. Among the most interesting phenomena of flavor physics is the violation of the CP symmetry that has been subtle and difficult to explore. Till early 1990s observations of CP violation were confined to neutral $K$ mesons, but since then a large number of CP-violating processes have been studied in detail in neutral $B$ mesons. In parallel, measurements of the couplings of the heavy quarks and the dynamics for their decays in large samples of $K, D$, and $B$ mesons have been greatly improved in accuracy and the results are being used as probes in the search for deviations from the Standard Model. In the near future, there will be a transition from the current to a new generation of experiments, thus a review of the status of quark flavor physics is timely. This report summarizes the results of the current generation of experiments that is about to be completed and it confronts these results with the theoretical understanding of the field.
With the advent of the LHC, we will be able to probe New Physics (NP) up to energy scales almost one order of magnitude larger than it has been possible with present accelerator facilities. While direct detection of new particles will be the main avenue to establish the presence of NP at the LHC, indirect searches will provide precious complementary information, since most probably it will not be possible to measure the full spectrum of new particles and their couplings through direct production. In particular, precision measurements and computations in the realm of flavour physics are expected to play a key role in constraining the unknown parameters of the Lagrangian of any NP model emerging from direct searches at the LHC. The aim of Working Group 2 was twofold: on one hand, to provide a coherent, up-to-date picture of the status of flavour physics before the start of the LHC; on the other hand, to initiate activities on the path towards integrating information on NP from high-pT and flavour data.
Combining the recently available experimental evidence of D-Dbar mixing, we extract model-independent information on the mixing amplitude and on its CP-violating phase. Using this information, we present new constraints on the flavour structure of up-type squark mass matrices in supersymmetric extensions of the Standard Model.
We present the first quenched lattice QCD study of the form factors relevant for the hyperon semileptonic decay Sigma -> n l nu. The momentum dependence of both axial and vector form factors is investigated and the values of all the form factors at zero-momentum transfer are presented. Following the same strategy already applied to the decay K0 -> pi- l nu, the SU(3)-breaking corrections to the vector form factor at zero-momentum transfer, f1(0), are determined with great statistical accuracy in the regime of the simulated quark masses, which correspond to pion masses above ~ 0.7 GeV. Besides f1(0) also the axial to vector ratio g1(0) / f1(0), which is relevant for the extraction of the CKM matrix element Vus, is determined with significant accuracy. Due to the heavy masses involved, a polynomial extrapolation, which does not include the effects of meson loops, is performed down to the physical quark masses, obtaining f1(0) = -0.948 +/- 0.029 and g1(0) / f1(0) = -0.287 +/- 0.052, where the uncertainties do not include the quenching effect. Adding a recent next-to-leading order determination of chiral loops, calculated within the Heavy Baryon Chiral Perturbation Theory in the approximation of neglecting the decuplet contribution, we obtain f1(0) = -0.988 +/- 0.029(lattice) +/- 0.040(HBChPT). Our findings indicate that SU(3)-breaking corrections are moderate on both f1(0) and g1(0). They also favor the experimental scenario in which the weak electricity form factor, g2(0), is large and positive, and correspondingly the value of |g1(0) / f1(0)| is reduced with respect to the one obtained with the conventional assumption g2(q**2) = 0 based on exact SU(3) symmetry.
We compute the next-to-leading order strong interaction corrections to gluino-mediated Delta F=2 box diagrams in the Minimal Supersymmetric Standard Model. These corrections are given by two loop diagrams which we have calculated in three different regularization schemes in the mass insertion approximation. We obtain the next-to-leading order Wilson coefficients of the Delta F=2 effective Hamiltonian relevant for neutral meson mixings. We find that the matching scale uncertainty is largely reduced at the next-to-leading order, typically from about 10-15% to few percent.
We apply twisted boundary conditions to lattice QCD simulations of three-point correlation functions in order to access spatial components of hadronic momenta different from the integer multiples of 2 pi / L. We calculate the vector and scalar form factors relevant to the K -> pi semileptonic decay and consider all the possible ways of twisting one of the quark lines in the three-point functions. We show that the momentum shift produced by the twisted boundary conditions does not introduce any additional noise and easily allows to determine within a few percent statistical accuracy the form factors at quite small values of the four-momentum transfer, which are not accessible when periodic boundary conditions are considered. The use of twisted boundary conditions turns out to be crucial for a precise determination of the form factor at zero-momentum transfer, when a precise lattice point sufficiently close to zero-momentum transfer is not accessible with periodic boundary conditions.
We present the NLO corrections to the Wilson coefficients of the Delta F = 2 Hamiltonians in the strong interacting sector of the MSSM, responsible for neutral meson oscillations. Such corrections, combined with the NLO anomalous dimension matrix for the Delta F = 2 operators and the corresponding hadronic matrix elements calculated on the lattice, allow for the first time a full NLO phenomenological analysis of the observables related to meson oscillations. We present preliminary results in the B_d - B_d bar sector.
We present a new study of SU(3)-breaking corrections in hyperon vector form factors relevant for the extraction of Vus. A lattice quenched simulation has been performed, showing that it is possible to reach the required precision to extract SU(3)-breaking corrections in the regime of simulated masses. In order to perform the chiral extrapolation we calculated the chiral corrections to the vector form factor in HBChPT. Besides the one-loop O(p^2) contribution, we included also the subleading O(p^3) and O(1/M_B) corrections that, due to the Ademollo-Gatto theorem, are free from the contamination of unknown low energy constants. The results complete and correct previous calculations, and show that subleading corrections cannot be neglected. We also studied decuplet contributions within HBChPT and show that, in this case, the chiral expansion breaks down, rising doubts on the consistency of the theory.
We discuss the result of a recent quenched lattice calculation of the K -> pi vector form factor at zero-momentum transfer, relevant for the determination of |V_us| from K-> pi l nu decays. Using suitable double ratios of three-point correlation functions, we show that it is possible to calculate this quantity at the percent-level precision. The leading quenched effects are corrected for by means of quenched chiral perturbation theory. The final result, f+(0) = 0.960 +- 0.005_stat +- 0.007_syst, turns out to be in good agreement with the old quark model estimate made by Leutwyler and Roos. In this paper, we discuss the phenomenological impact of the lattice result for the extraction of |V_us|, by updating the analysis of K -> pi l nu decays with the most recent experimental data. We also present a preliminary lattice study of hyperon Sigma -> n l nu decays, based on a similar strategy.
We present a new method for extracting excited states from a single two-point correlation function calculated on the lattice. Our method simply combines the correlation function evaluated at different time slices so as to ``subtract'' the leading exponential decay (ground state) and to give access to the first excited state. The method is applied to a quenched lattice study (volume = 24^3 x 64, beta = 6.2, 1/a = 2.55 GeV) of the first excited state of the nucleon using the local interpolating operator O = [uT C gamma5 d] u. The results are consistent with the identification of our extracted excited state with the Roper resonance N'(1440). The switching of the level ordering with respect to the negative-parity partner of the nucleon, N*(1535), is not seen at the simulated quark masses and, basing on crude extrapolations, is tentatively expected to occur close to the physical point.
We present preliminary results of an exploratory lattice study of the vector form factor $f_1(q^2 = 0)$ relevant for the semileptonic hyperon decay $Σ^{-} --> n l ν$. This study is based on the same method used for the extraction of $f^+(0)$ for the decay $K^0 --> π^{-} l ν$. The main purpose of this study is to test the method for hyperon form factors in order to estimate the precision that can be reached and the importance of SU(3)-breaking effects.
We investigate the role played by the fermionic determinant in the evaluation of the CP-violating neutron electric dipole moment (EDM) adopting the Instanton Liquid Model. Significant differences between quenched and unquenched calculations are found. In the case of unquenched simulations the neutron EDM decreases linearly with the quark mass and is expected to vanish in the chiral limit. On the contrary, within the quenched approximation, the neutron EDM increases as the quark mass decreases and is expected to diverge as (1/m)**Nf in the chiral limit. We argue that such a qualitatively different behavior is a parameter-free, semi-classical prediction and occurs because the neutron EDM is sensitive to the topological structure of the vacuum. The present analysis suggests that quenched and unquenched lattice QCD simulations of the neutron EDM as well as of other observables governed by topology might show up important differences in the quark mass dependence, for mq < Lambda(QCD).