arXiv subjects
Publications and source records attributed to S. Willenbrock.
I review why we believe the electromagnetic, strong, and weak interactions are gauge theories, and what this implies for the self interactions of the gauge bosons. The modern point of view regarding non-renormalizable effective field theories is emphasized.
I review the status of the top quark, and look forward to three topics relevant to future top-quark physics; spin correlation, single-top-quark production, and unification.
We propose techniques to observe the correlation of the spins of top quarks and antiquarks at the Tevatron and the LHC. Observation of the spin correlation would confirm that the top quark decays before its spin flips, and would place a lower bound on the top-quark width and V_tb. The spin correlation may also be a useful tool to study the weak decay amplitude of the top quark.
We review the search for the standard Higgs boson, the Higgs bosons of the supersymmetric standard model, and Higgs bosons from a variety of other models at present and future colliders.
I discuss some of the physics of the top quark which will be explored in the near and more-distant future at the Tevatron.
We consider single-top-quark production via the weak process $q\bar q to t\bar b$ at hadron colliders. This process may provide the best measurement of the magnitude of the Cabbibo-Kobayashi-Maskawa matrix element $V_{tb}$. We show that a signal can potentially be observed at the Fermilab Tevatron with 3 $fb^{-1}$ of integrated luminosity. In contrast, the signal is masked at the CERN Large Hadron Collider by top-quark pair production and single-top-quark production via $W$-gluon fusion.
I examine the possibility that the electroweak interaction breaks itself via the condensation of fermions in large representations of the weak SU(2)_L gauge group.
Withdrawn. We thank J. T. Liu for bringing an error in the manuscript to our attention.
We study meson decays mediated by the heavy gauge bosons of the Pati-Salam model of quark-lepton unification. We consider the scenarios in which the tau lepton is associated with the third, second, and first generation of quarks. The most sensitive probes, depending on the scenario, are rare K, pi, and B decays.
We consider the search for the Higgs boson at a high-luminosity Fermilab Tevatron, an upgraded Tevatron of energy 3.5 TeV, and the CERN Large Hadron Collider, via $WH/ZH$ production followed by H -> bb~ and leptonic decay of the weak vector bosons. We show that each of these colliders can potentially observe the standard Higgs boson in the intermediate-mass range, 80 GeV γγat the LHC. In addition, it can potentially be used to observe the lightest Higgs scalar of the minimal supersymmetric model in a region of parameter space not accessible to CERN LEP II or the LHC (using h -> γγ,ZZ^*).
Higgs bosons which decay principally to top quarks, such as in the minimal supersymmetric model, produce a peak-dip structure in the $gg\to t\bar t$ invariant-mass spectrum. This structure is potentially observable at the CERN Large Hadron Collider. (see BNL theory home page http://penguin.phy.bnl.gov/bnl.html for recent preprints)
The Wjj background has increased by 70%. This decreases the significance of the WH signal somewhat. The significance of the ZH signal remains about the same.
In the standard Higgs model of electroweak symmetry breaking, the Higgs boson is associated with both vector-boson and fermion mass generation. In contrast, we discuss a two-Higgs-doublet model in which these masses are associated with two different scalar bosons. We show that the Higgs boson associated with vector-boson mass generation produces a {\it dip\/} in the cross section for $t\bar t\to ZZ$ via a final-state interaction. Such a dip will be difficult to observe at the LHC/SSC.
We discuss weak-vector-boson scattering, at next-to-leading order in QCD, within the framework of hadronic structure functions. We use this approach to calculate the Higgs-boson production cross section via vector-boson fusion at the LHC/SSC; we find a modest increase over the leading-order prediction. We also give expressions for the distribution of vector bosons in a proton (effective-$W$ approximation) including ${\cal O} (α_s)$ corrections.