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Gian Francesco Giudice

Publications and source records attributed to Gian Francesco Giudice.

16 recordsLinked to original sources

Kaon Physics: A Cornerstone for Future Discoveries

The kaon physics programme, long heralded as a cutting-edge frontier by the European Strategy for Particle Physics, continues to stand at the intersection of discovery and innovation in high-energy physics (HEP). With its unparalleled capacity to explore new physics at the multi-TeV scale, kaon research is poised to unveil phenomena that could reshape our understanding of the Universe. This document highlights the compelling physics case, with emphasis on exciting new opportunities for advancing kaon physics not only in Europe but also on a global stage. As an important player in the future of HEP, the kaon programme promises to drive transformative breakthroughs, inviting exploration at the forefront of scientific discovery.

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Terrestrial Very-Long-Baseline Atom Interferometry: Workshop Summary

This document presents a summary of the 2023 Terrestrial Very-Long-Baseline Atom Interferometry Workshop hosted by CERN. The workshop brought together experts from around the world to discuss the exciting developments in large-scale atom interferometer (AI) prototypes and their potential for detecting ultralight dark matter and gravitational waves. The primary objective of the workshop was to lay the groundwork for an international TVLBAI proto-collaboration. This collaboration aims to unite researchers from different institutions to strategize and secure funding for terrestrial large-scale AI projects. The ultimate goal is to create a roadmap detailing the design and technology choices for one or more km-scale detectors, which will be operational in the mid-2030s. The key sections of this report present the physics case and technical challenges, together with a comprehensive overview of the discussions at the workshop together with the main conclusions.

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Feebly-Interacting Particles:FIPs 2020 Workshop Report

With the establishment and maturation of the experimental programs searching for new physics with sizeable couplings at the LHC, there is an increasing interest in the broader particle and astrophysics community for exploring the physics of light and feebly-interacting particles as a paradigm complementary to a New Physics sector at the TeV scale and beyond. FIPs 2020 has been the first workshop fully dedicated to the physics of feebly-interacting particles and was held virtually from 31 August to 4 September 2020. The workshop has gathered together experts from collider, beam dump, fixed target experiments, as well as from astrophysics, axions/ALPs searches, current/future neutrino experiments, and dark matter direct detection communities to discuss progress in experimental searches and underlying theory models for FIPs physics, and to enhance the cross-fertilisation across different fields. FIPs 2020 has been complemented by the topical workshop "Physics Beyond Colliders meets theory", held at CERN from 7 June to 9 June 2020. This document presents the summary of the talks presented at the workshops and the outcome of the subsequent discussions held immediately after. It aims to provide a clear picture of this blooming field and proposes a few recommendations for the next round of experimental results.

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The Dawn of the Post-Naturalness Era

In an imaginary conversation with Guido Altarelli, I express my views on the status of particle physics beyond the Standard Model and its future prospects.

physics.hist-ph↗

Benchmarks for Dark Matter Searches at the LHC

We propose some scenarios to pursue dark matter searches at the LHC in a fairly model-independent way. The first benchmark case is dark matter co-annihilations with coloured particles (gluinos or squarks being special examples). We determine the masses that lead to the correct thermal relic density including, for the first time, strong Sommerfeld corrections taking into account colour decomposition. In the second benchmark case we consider dark matter that couples to SM particles via the Z or the Higgs. We determine the couplings allowed by present experiments and discuss future prospects. Finally we present the case of dark matter that freezes out via decays and apply our results to invisible Z and Higgs decays.

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Direct CP violation in charm and flavor mixing beyond the SM

We analyze possible interpretations of the recent LHCb evidence for CP violation in D meson decays in terms of physics beyond the Standard Model. On general grounds, models in which the primary source of flavor violation is linked to the breaking of chiral symmetry (left-right flavor mixing) are natural candidates to explain this effect, via enhanced chromomagnetic operators. In the case of supersymmetric models, we identify two motivated scenarios: disoriented A-terms and split families. These structures predict other non-standard signals, such as nuclear EDMs close to their present bounds and, possibly, tiny but visible deviations in K and B physics, or even sizable flavor-violating processes involving the top quark or the stops. Some of these connections, especially the one with nuclear EDMs, hold beyond supersymmetry, as illustrated with the help of prototype non-supersymmetric models.

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Big Science and the Large Hadron Collider

The Large Hadron Collider (LHC), the particle accelerator operating at CERN, is probably the most complex and ambitious scientific project ever accomplished by humanity. The sheer size of the enterprise, in terms of financial and human resources, naturally raises the question whether society should support such costly basic-research programs. I address this question here by first reviewing the process that led to the emergence of Big Science and the role of large projects in the development of science and technology. I then compare the methodologies of Small and Big Science, emphasizing their mutual linkage. Finally, after examining the cost of Big Science projects, I highlight several general aspects of their beneficial implications for society.

physics.hist-ph↗

Counting dark matter particles in LHC events

We suggest trying to count the number of invisible particles produced in missing energy events at the LHC, arguing that multiple production of such particles provides evidence that they constitute stable Dark Matter and that counting them could yield further insights into the nature of Dark Matter. We propose a method to count invisible particles, based on fitting the shapes of certain transverse- or invariant-mass distributions, discuss various effects that may affect the measurement, and simulate the use of the method to count neutrinos in Standard Model processes and Dark Matter candidates in new physics processes.

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Flavourful Production at Hadron Colliders

We ask what new states may lie at or below the TeV scale, with sizable flavour-dependent couplings to light quarks, putting them within reach of hadron colliders via resonant production, or in association with Standard Model states. In particular, we focus on the compatibility of such states with stringent flavour-changing neutral current and electric-dipole moment constraints. We argue that the broadest and most theoretically plausible flavour structure of the new couplings is that they are hierarchical, as are Standard Model Yukawa couplings, although the hierarchical pattern may well be different. We point out that, without the need for any more elaborate or restrictive structure, new scalars with "diquark" couplings to standard quarks are particularly immune to existing constraints, and that such scalars may arise within a variety of theoretical paradigms. In particular, there can be substantial couplings to a pair of light quarks or to one light and one heavy quark. For example, the latter possibility may provide a flavour-safe interpretation of the asymmetry in top quark production observed at the Tevatron. We thereby motivate searches for diquark scalars at the Tevatron and LHC, and argue that their discovery represents one of our best chances for new insight into the Flavour Puzzle of the Standard Model.

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LHC bounds on large extra dimensions

We derive new dominant bounds on the coefficient of the effective operator generated by tree-level graviton exchange in large extra dimensions from pp \rightarrow jj data at LHC: M_T > 2.1TeV (ATLAS after 3.1/pb of integrated luminosity), M_T > 3.4 TeV (CMS after 36/pb), MT > 3.2 TeV (ATLAS after 36/pb). We clarify the role of on-shell graviton exchange and compare the full graviton amplitude to ATLAS data, setting bounds on the fundamental quantum-gravity scale.

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Lopsided Gauge Mediation

It has been recently pointed out that the unavoidable tuning among supersymmetric parameters required to raise the Higgs boson mass beyond its experimental limit opens up new avenues for dealing with the so called $μ$-$B_μ$ problem of gauge mediation. In fact, it allows for accommodating, with no further parameter tuning, large values of $B_μ$ and of the other Higgs-sector soft masses, as predicted in models where both $μ$ and $B_μ$ are generated at one-loop order. This class of models, called Lopsided Gauge Mediation, offers an interesting alternative to conventional gauge mediation and is characterized by a strikingly different phenomenology, with light higgsinos, very large Higgs pseudoscalar mass, and moderately light sleptons. We discuss general parametric relations involving the fine-tuning of the model and various observables such as the chargino mass and the value of $\tanβ$. We build an explicit model and we study the constraints coming from LEP and Tevatron. We show that in spite of new interactions between the Higgs and the messenger superfields, the theory can remain perturbative up to very large scales, thus retaining gauge coupling unification.

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Constraints on extra-dimensional theories from virtual-graviton exchange

We study the effective interactions induced by loops of extra-dimensional gravitons and show the special role of a specific dimension-6 four-fermion operator, product of two flavour-universal axial currents. By introducing an ultraviolet cut-off, we compare the present constraints on low-scale quantum gravity from various processes involving real-graviton emission and virtual-graviton exchange. The LEP2 limits on dimension-6 four-fermion interactions give one of the strongest constraint on the theory, in particular excluding the case of strongly-interacting gravity at the weak scale.

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Phenomenological implications of neutrinos in extra dimensions

Standard Model singlet neutrinos propagating in extra dimensions induce small Dirac neutrino masses. While it seems rather unlikely that their Kaluza-Klein excitations directly participate in the observed neutrino oscillations, their virtual exchange may lead to detectable signatures in future neutrino experiments and in rare charged lepton processes. We show how these effects can be described by specific dimension-six effective operators and discuss their experimental signals.

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Largest temperature of the radiation era and its cosmological implications

The thermal history of the universe before the epoch of nucleosynthesis is unknown. The maximum temperature in the radiation-dominated era, which we will refer to as the reheat temperature, may have been as low as 0.7 MeV. In this paper we show that a low reheat temperature has important implications for many topics in cosmology. We show that weakly interacting massive particles (WIMPs) may be produced even if the reheat temperature is much smaller than the freeze-out temperature of the WIMP, and that the dependence of the present abundance on the mass and the annihilation cross section of the WIMP differs drastically from familiar results. We revisit predictions of the relic abundance and resulting model constraints of supersymmetric dark matter, axions, massive neutrinos, and other dark matter candidates, nucleosynthesis constraints on decaying particles, and leptogenesis by decay of superheavy particles. We find that the allowed parameter space of supersymmetric models is altered, removing the usual bounds on the mass spectrum; the cosmological bound on massive neutrinos is drastically changed, ruling out Dirac (Majorana) neutrino masses $m_ν$ only in the range 33 keV $\simlt m_ν\simlt$ 6 (5) MeV, which is significantly smaller from the the standard disallowed range 94 eV $\simlt m_ν\simlt$ 2 GeV (this implies that massive neutrinos may still play the role of either warm or cold dark matter); the cosmological upper bound on the Peccei-Quinn scale may be significantly increased to $ 10^{16}$GeV from the usually cited limit of about $10^{12}$GeV; and that efficient out-of-equilibrium GUT baryogenesis and/or leptogenesis can take place even if the reheat temperature is much smaller than the mass of the decaying superheavy particle.

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