arXiv subjects
Publications and source records attributed to Elena Papageorgiu.
We review recent work on the interplay between broken family symmetries which give rise to approximate texture zeros in the mass matrices of the quarks and leptons and the presence of certain hierarchy patterns in the spectrum of massive neutrinos.
We reexamine the prospects for searching for a neutral Higgs boson in the intermediate-mass range and physics beyond the standard model, using the proton- and ion-beam facilities of the LHC to study coherent two-photon processes. Considering realistic design luminosities for the different ion beams, we find that beams of light-to-medium size ions like calcium will give the highest production rates. With a suitable trigger and assuming a b-quark identification efficiency of $30\%$ and a $b{\bar b}$ mass resolution of 10 GeV one could expect to see a Higgs signal in the $b{\bar b}$ channel with a 3-4 $σ$ statistical significance in the first phase of operation of the LHC with beams of calcium. The discovery potential for light supersymmetric particles is as promissing. The study of such very ``quiet'' final state topologies in heavy ion collisions could even lead to the discovery of a new phase of QED.
Assuming that a horizontal abelian (gauge) symmetry is at the origin of texture zeros in the fermion mass matrices we show how realistic mass patterns can be generated in the presence of scalar fields whose vacuum expectation value breaks the extra $U(1)$ symmetry. In the simplest scenario with just one pair of singlet fields and under the assumption of L-R symmetry one obtains quark mass matrices {\it à la Fritzsch}. The $U(1)$ symmetry can be made anomaly free by the Green-Schwarz mechanism in which case the canonical unification of the gauge couplings emerges as its byproduct. The generation of neutrino masses requires either two extra heavy scalar (Higgs) fields to determine the texture structure of the righthanded neutrino mass matrix or the latter will contain a hierarchy of scales.