arXiv subjects
Publications and source records attributed to Stephen P. Martin.
The leading QCD part of the four-loop contribution to the effective potential for the Standard Model Higgs field is found. As a byproduct, I also find the corresponding contribution to the four-loop beta function of the Higgs self-interaction coupling.
I obtain the complex pole squared mass of the Z boson at full two-loop order in the Standard Model in the pure MS-bar renormalization scheme. The input parameters are the running gauge couplings, the top-quark Yukawa coupling, the Higgs self-coupling, and the vacuum expectation value that minimizes the Landau gauge effective potential. The effects of non-zero Goldstone boson mass are resummed. Within a reasonable range of renormalization scale choices, the scale dependence of the computed pole mass is found to be comparable to the current experimental uncertainty, but the true theoretical error is likely somewhat larger.
I provide a calculation at full two-loop order of the complex pole squared mass of the W boson in the Standard Model in the pure MS-bar renormalization scheme, with Goldstone boson mass effects resummed. This approach is an alternative to earlier ones that use on-shell or hybrid renormalization schemes. The renormalization scale dependence of the real and imaginary parts of the resulting pole mass are studied. Both deviate by about $\pm 4$ MeV from their median values as the renormalization scale is varied from 50 GeV to 200 GeV, but the theory error is likely larger. A surprising feature of this scheme is that the 2-loop QCD correction has a larger scale-dependence, but a smaller magnitude, than the 2-loop non-QCD correction, unless the renormalization scale is chosen very far from the top-quark mass.
We study the prospects for LHC discovery of a narrow resonance that decays to two Higgs bosons, using the final state of two photons and two bottom jets. Our work is motivated in part by a scenario in which two-body flavor-preserving decays of the top squark are kinematically forbidden. Stoponium, a hadronic bound state of the top squark and its anti-particle, will then form, and may have a large branching fraction into the two Higgs boson final state. We estimate the cross-section needed for a 5-sigma discovery at the 14 TeV LHC for such a narrow di-Higgs resonance, using the invariant mass distributions of the final state bottom jets and photons, as a function of the integrated luminosity. The results are also applicable to any other di-Higgs resonance produced by gluon fusion.
The standard perturbative effective potential suffers from two related problems of principle involving the field-dependent Goldstone boson squared mass, G. First, in general G can be negative, and it actually is negative in the Standard Model; this leads to imaginary contributions to the effective potential that are not associated with a physical instability, and therefore spurious. Second, in the limit that G approaches zero, the effective potential minimization condition is logarithmically divergent already at two-loop order, and has increasingly severe power-law singularities at higher loop orders. I resolve both issues by resumming the Goldstone boson contributions to the effective potential. For the resulting resummed effective potential, the minimum value and the minimization condition that gives the vacuum expectation value are obtained in forms that do not involve G at all.
I consider models with non-universal gaugino masses at the gauge coupling unification scale, taking into account the Higgs boson discovery. Viable regions of parameter space are mapped and studied in the case of non-universality following from an F-term in a linear combination of singlet and adjoint representations of SU(5). I consider, in particular, "semi-natural" models that have small μ, with gaugino masses dominating the supersymmetry breaking terms at high energies. Higgsino-like particles are then much lighter than all other superpartners, and the prospects for discovery at the Large Hadron Collider can be extremely challenging.
I find the three-loop contribution to the effective potential for the Standard Model Higgs field, in the approximation that the strong and top Yukawa couplings are large compared to all other couplings, using dimensional regularization with modified minimal subtraction. Checks follow from gauge invariance and renormalization group invariance. I also briefly comment on the special problems posed by Goldstone boson contributions to the effective potential, and on the numerical impact of the result on the relations between the Higgs vacuum expectation value, mass, and self-interaction coupling.
The Higgs mass determination from diphoton events at the LHC can be affected by interference between the Higgs resonant and continuum background amplitudes with the same initial and final states. For the leading order gluon fusion process, this shift was previously found to exceed 100 MeV, with some dependence on the diphoton mass resolution and the methods used to extract and fit the peak from data. In this paper, I consider the mass shift for the process pp --> jγγ that includes an additional central jet in the final state. For cuts on the transverse momentum of the jet of 25 GeV or more, the diphoton Higgs peak mass shift due to interference is found to be very small, due in part to less interference for the gluon-gluon initiated subprocess, and in part to a cancellation between it and the quark-gluon initiated subprocess.
The Higgs diphoton amplitude from gluon fusion at the LHC interferes with the continuum background induced by quark loops. I investigate the effect of this interference on the position of the diphoton invariant mass peak used to help determine the Higgs mass. At leading order, the interference shifts the peak towards lower mass by an amount of order 150 MeV or more, with the precise value dependent on the methods used to analyze and fit the data.
We investigate the implications of models that achieve a Standard Model-like Higgs boson of mass near 125 GeV by introducing additional TeV-scale supermultiplets in the vector-like 10+\bar{10} representation of SU(5), within the context of gauge-mediated supersymmetry breaking. We study the resulting mass spectrum of superpartners, comparing and contrasting to the usual gauge-mediated and CMSSM scenarios, and discuss implications for LHC supersymmetry searches. This approach implies that exotic vector-like fermions t'_{1,2}, b',and τ' should be within the reach of the LHC. We discuss the masses, the couplings to electroweak bosons, and the decay branching ratios of the exotic fermions, with and without various unification assumptions for the mass and mixing parameters. We comment on LHC prospects for discovery of the exotic fermion states, both for decays that are prompt and non-prompt on detector-crossing time scales.
We study a class of supersymmetric models with non-universal gaugino masses that could arise from F-terms in a general combination of the singlet and adjoint representations of SU(5). We explore models that satisfy present Large Hadron Collider and other bounds, showing how the allowed parameter space is divided into distinct "continents". Regions of parameter space that ameliorate the supersymmetric little hierarchy problem with a small mu parameter include the usual focus point scenario, but also natural areas with much lighter squarks and sleptons. These models are continuously connected in parameter space to regions in which stau co-annihilation or Higgs exchange is mostly responsible for dark matter annihilation, and to models in which the thermal relic abundance is achieved by slepton-mediated annihilation, reviving the bulk region that is severely restricted in mSUGRA models. In hybrid or confluence regions, several mechanisms combine to give the requisite dark matter annihilation rate. In each case we study the prospects for direct detection of dark matter. We also comment briefly on the impact of recent hints for M_h near 125 GeV from the LHC.
We study the reach of the Large Hadron Collider with 1/fb of data at sqrt{s} = 7 TeV for several classes of supersymmetric models with compressed mass spectra, using jets and missing transverse energy cuts like those employed by ATLAS for Summer 2011 data. In the limit of extreme compression, the best limits come from signal regions that do not require more than 2 or 3 jets and that remove backgrounds by requiring more missing energy rather than higher effective mass.
Many theoretical and experimental results on the reach of the Large Hadron Collider are based on the mSUGRA-inspired scenario with universal soft supersymmetry breaking parameters at the apparent gauge coupling unification scale. We study signals for supersymmetric models in which the sparticle mass range is compressed compared to mSUGRA, using cuts like those employed by ATLAS for 2010 data. The acceptance and the cross-section times acceptance are found for several model lines that employ a compression parameter to smoothly interpolate between the mSUGRA case and the extreme case of degenerate gaugino masses at the weak scale. For models with moderate compression, the reach is not much worse, and can even be substantially better, than the mSUGRA case. For very compressed mass spectra, the acceptances are drastically reduced, especially when a more stringent effective mass cut is chosen.
I investigate the phenomenology of supersymmetric models with extra vector-like supermultiplets that couple to the Standard Model gauge fields and transform as the fundamental representation of a new confining non-Abelian gauge interaction. If perturbative gauge coupling unification is to be maintained, the new group can be SU(2), SU(3), or SO(3). The impact on the sparticle mass spectrum is explored, with particular attention to the gaugino mass dominated limit in which the supersymmetric flavor problem is naturally solved. The new confinement length scale is astronomical for SO(3), so the new particles are essentially free. For the SU(2) and SU(3) cases, the new vector-like fermions are quirks; pair production at colliders yields quirk-antiquirk states bound by stable flux tubes that are microscopic but long compared to the new confinement scale. I study the reach of the Tevatron and LHC for the optimistic case that in a significant fraction of events the quirk-antiquirk bound state will lose most of its energy before annihilating as quirkonium.
Extra vector-like matter with both electroweak-singlet masses and large Yukawa couplings can significantly raise the lightest Higgs boson mass in supersymmetry through radiative corrections. I consider models of this type that involve a large Yukawa coupling between weak isotriplet and isodoublet chiral supermultiplets. The particle content can be completed to provide perturbative gauge coupling unification, in several different ways. The impact on precision electroweak observables is shown to be acceptably small, even if the new particles are as light as the current experimental bounds of order 100 GeV. I study the corrections to the lightest Higgs boson mass, and discuss the general features of the collider signatures for the new fermions in these models.
If the lighter top squark has no kinematically allowed two-body decays that conserve flavor, then it will live long enough to form hadronic bound states. The observation of the diphoton decays of stoponium could then provide a uniquely precise measurement of the top squark mass. In this paper, we calculate the cross section for the production of stoponium in a hadron collider at next-to-leading order (NLO) in QCD. We present numerical results for the cross section for production of stoponium at the LHC and study the dependence on beam energy, stoponium mass, and the renormalization and factorization scale. The cross-section is substantially increased by the NLO corrections, counteracting a corresponding decrease found earlier in the NLO diphoton branching ratio.
The lightest Higgs scalar boson mass in supersymmetry can be raised significantly by extra vector-like quark and lepton supermultiplets with large Yukawa couplings but dominantly electroweak-singlet masses. I consider models of this type that maintain perturbative gauge coupling unification. The impact of the new particles on precision electroweak observables is found to be moderate, with the fit to Z-pole data as good or better than that of the Standard Model even if the new Yukawa couplings are as large as their fixed-point values and the extra vector-like quark masses are as light as 400 GeV. I study the size of corrections to the lightest Higgs boson mass, taking into account the fixed-point behavior of the scalar trilinear couplings. I also discuss the decay branchings ratios of the lightest new quarks and leptons and general features of the resulting collider signatures.
The lighter top squark in supersymmetry can live long enough to form hadronic bound states if it has no kinematically allowed two-body decays that conserve flavor. In this case, scalar stoponium may be observable through its diphoton decay mode at the CERN Large Hadron Collider, enabling a uniquely precise measurement of the top-squark mass. The viability of the signal depends crucially on the branching ratio to diphotons. We compute the next-to-leading order QCD radiative corrections to stoponium annihilation decays to hadrons, photons, and Higgs scalar bosons. We find that the effect of these corrections is to significantly decrease the predicted branching ratio to the important diphoton channel. We also find a greatly improved renormalization-scale dependence of the diphoton branching ratio prediction.