arXiv subjects

Yi Liao

Publications and source records attributed to Yi Liao.

At least 127 records · Page 7Linked to original sources

arXiv2012

Spin 3/2 Particle as a Dark Matter Candidate: an Effective Field Theory Approach

There is no indication so far on the spin of dark matter particles. We consider the possibility in this work that a spin-3/2 particle acts as dark matter. Employing the approach of effective field theory, we list all possible 4-fermion effective interactions between a pair of such fields and a pair of ordinary fermion fields. We investigate the implications of the proposal on the relic density, the antiproton to proton flux ratio in cosmic rays, and the elastic scattering off nuclei in direct detection. While the relic density and flux ratio are sensitive to all interactions albeit at different levels, the direct detection is only sensitive to a few of them. Using the observed data and experimental bounds, we set constraints on the relation of couplings and dark particle mass. In particular, we find that some mass ranges can already be excluded by jointly applying the observed relic density on the one side and the measured antiproton to proton flux ratio or the upper bounds from direct detection on the other.

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arXiv2012

Constraints on Neutrino Velocities Revisited

With a minimally modified dispersion relation for neutrinos, we reconsider the constraints on superluminal neutrino velocities from bremsstrahlung effects in the laboratory frame. Employing both the direct calculation approach and the virtual Z-boson approach, we obtain the generic decay width and energy loss rate of a superluminal neutrino with general energy. The Cohen-Glashow's analytical results for neutrinos with a relatively low energy are confirmed in both approaches. We employ the survival probability instead of the terminal energy to assess whether a neutrino with a given energy is observable or not in the OPERA experiment. Moreover, using our general results we perform systematical analyses on the constraints arising from the Super-Kamiokande and IceCube experiments.

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arXiv2011

Cascade Seesaw for Tiny Neutrino Mass

The accessibility to physics responsible for tiny neutrino mass suggests that the mass should better originate from certain higher dimensional operators. The conventional three types of seesaw operate at dimension five with the help of either a new fermion or scalar multiplet. Here we propose a seesaw that generates neutrino mass through a dimension-(5+4n) operator. The seesaw is functioned by a fermion of isospin n+1 and zero hypercharge and a sequence of scalar multiplets that share unity hypercharge but have isospin from 3/2 to n+1/2 at a step of unity. Only the scalar of the highest isospin can couple to the relevant fermions while only the scalar of the lowest isospin can directly develop a naturally small vacuum expectation value (VEV). The VEV is then transmitted to scalars of higher isospin through a cascading process. No global symmetry is required to forbid lower dimensional operators. A neutrino mass of desired order can thus be induced with a relatively low seesaw scale without demanding too small couplings.

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arXiv2011

Neutrino Mass Operators of Dimension up to Nine in Two-Higgs-doublet Model

We study higher-dimensional neutrino mass operators in a low energy theory that contains a second Higgs doublet, the two Higgs doublet model. The operators are relevant to underlying theories in which the lowest dimension-five mass operators would not be induced. We list the independent operators with dimension up to nine with the help of Young tableau. Also listed are the lowest dimension seven operators that involve gauge bosons and violate the lepton number by two units. We briefly mention some of possible phenomenological implications.

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arXiv2010

Flavor Violating Transitions of Charged Leptons from a Seesaw Mechanism of Dimension Seven

A mechanism has been suggested recently to generate the neutrino mass out of a dimension-seven operator. This is expected to relieve the tension between the occurrence of a tiny neutrino mass and the observability of other physics effects beyond it. Such a mechanism would inevitably entail lepton flavor violating effects. We study in this work the radiative and purely leptonic transitions of the light charged leptons. In so doing we make a systematic analysis of the flavor structure by providing a convenient parametrization of the mass matrices in terms of independent physical parameters and diagonalizing them explicitly. We illustrate our numerical results by sampling over two CP phases and one Yukawa coupling which are the essential parameters in addition to the heavy lepton mass. We find that with the stringent constraints coming from the muon decays and the muon-electron conversion in nuclei taken into account the decays of the tau lepton are severely suppressed in the majority of parameter space. There exist, however, small regions in which some tau decays can reach a level that is about 2 orders of magnitude below their current bounds.

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arXiv2010

Unique Neutrino Mass Operator at any Mass Dimension

When the standard model is viewed as a low energy effective theory, the neutrinos can obtain mass from higher dimensional operators. It has been known for long that such an operator first appears at mass dimension five and that it is unique. Here we show that the effective neutrino mass operator at every higher dimension is unique. This general claim is established using Young tableau, and illustrated by exhausting all potentially different operators at dimension seven. The result is relevant to the search of new physics effects beyond neutrino mass that can arise at a relatively low energy scale.

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arXiv2009

Radiative and flavor-violating transitions of leptons from interactions with color-octet particles

It has been recently proposed that neutrino mass could originate from Yukawa interactions of leptons with new colored particles. This raises the interesting possibility of testing mass generation through copious production of those particles at hadron colliders. A realistic assessment of it however should take into account how large those interactions could be from available precision results. In this work we make a systematic analysis to the flavor structure in Yukawa couplings, provide a convenient parametrization to it, and investigate the rare radiative and pure leptonic decays of the muon and tau leptons. For general values of parameters the muon decays set stringent constraints on the couplings, and all rare tau decays are far below the current experimental sensitivity. However, there is room in parameter space in which the muon decays could be significantly suppressed by destructive interference between colored particles without generically reducing the couplings themselves. This is also the region of parameters that is relevant to collider physics. We show that for this part of parameter space some tau decays can reach or are close to the current level of precision.

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arXiv2009

Radiative Neutrino Mass in Type III Seesaw Model

The simplest type III seesaw model as originally proposed introduces one lepton triplet. It thus contains four active neutrinos, two massive and two massless at tree level. We determine the radiative masses that the latter receive first at two loops. The masses are generally so tiny that they are definitely excluded by the oscillation data, if the heavy leptons are not very heavy, say, within the reach of LHC. To accommodate the data on masses, the seesaw scale must be as large as the scale of grand unification. This indicates that the most economical type III model would entail no new physics at low energies beyond the tiny neutrino masses.

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arXiv2009

Electric Dipole Moments of Charged Leptons from Their Majorana-type Yukawa Couplings

The electric dipole moments (EDMs) of charged leptons are significantly suppressed in standard model. It has been found previously that they are even more severely suppressed in seesaw type models by powers of tiny neutrino masses as far as a leptonic CP source is concerned. We investigate whether a Majorana-type Yukawa coupling between charged leptons and a doubly charged scalar can contribute significantly to their EDMs. An observable EDM would then help unravel the Majorana nature of neutrinos by a lepton number conserving quantity. We find that the EDMs are indeed parametrically large, of the form d_α\propto em_α(m^2_β-m^2_γ)/m^4 up to logarithms, where m_αand m are respectively the masses of charged leptons and the scalar. And they satisfy a sum rule to good precision, d_e/m_e+d_μ/m_μ+d_τ/m_τ=0. With the most stringent constraints from lepton flavor violating transitions taken into account, their values are still much larger than the mentioned previous results. Unfortunately, even in the most optimistic case the electron EDM is about three orders of magnitude below the foreseeable experimental sensitivity.

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arXiv2009

Thermal Unparticles: A New Form of Energy Density in the Universe

Unparticle $\U$ with scaling dimension $d_\U$ has peculiar thermal properties due to its unique phase space structure. We find that the equation of state parameter $ω_\U$, the ratio of pressure to energy density, is given by $1/(2d_\U +1)$ providing a new form of energy in our universe. In an expanding universe, the unparticle energy density $ρ_\U(T)$ evolves dramatically differently from that for photons. For $d_\U >1$, even if $ρ_\U(T_D)$ at a high decoupling temperature $T_D$ is very small, it is possible to have a large relic density $ρ_\U(T^0_γ)$ at present photon temperature $T^0_γ$, large enough to play the role of dark matter. We calculate $T_D$ and $ρ_\U(T^0_γ)$ using photon-unparticle interactions for illustration.

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arXiv2008

Some Issues in a Gauge Model of Unparticles

We address in a recent gauge model of unparticles the issues that are important for consistency of a gauge theory, i.e., unitarity and Ward identity of physical amplitudes. We find that non-integrable singularities arise in physical quantities like cross section and decay rate from gauge interactions of unparticles. We also show that Ward identity is violated due to the lack of a dispersion relation for charged unparticles although the Ward-Takahashi identity for general Green functions is incorporated in the model. A previous observation that the unparticle's (with scaling dimension d) contribution to the gauge boson self-energy is a factor (2-d) of the particle's has been extended to the Green function of triple gauge bosons. This (2-d) rule may be generally true for any point Green functions of gauge bosons. This implies that the model would be trivial even as one that mimics certain dynamical effects on gauge bosons in which unparticles serve as an interpolating field.

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arXiv2008

Lepton Flavor Violating Muon Decays in a Model of Electroweak-Scale Right-Handed Neutrinos

The small neutrino mass observed in neutrino oscillations is nicely explained by the seesaw mechanism. Rich phenomenology is generally expected if the heavy neutrinos are not much heavier than the electroweak scale. A model with this feature built in has been suggested recently by Hung. The model keeps the standard gauge group but introduces chirality-flipped partners for the fermions. In particular, a right-handed neutrino forms a weak doublet with a charged heavy lepton, and is thus active. We analyze the lepton flavor structure in gauge interactions. The mixing matrices in charged currents (CC) are generally non-unitary, and their deviation from unitarity induces flavor changing neutral currents (FCNC). We calculate the branching ratios for the rare decays μ\to eγand μ\to ee\bar e due to the gauge interactions. Although the former is generally smaller than the latter by three orders of magnitude, parameter regions exist in which μ\to eγis reachable in the next generation of experiments even if the current stringent bound on μ\to ee\bar e is taken into account. If light neutrinos dominate for μ\to eγ, the latter cannot set a meaningful bound on unitarity violation in the mixing matrix of light leptons due to significant cancelation between CC and FCNC contributions. Instead, the role is taken over by the decay μ\to ee\bar e.

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arXiv2008

Effects of Unparticles on Running of Gauge Couplings

Unparticles charged under a gauge group can contribute to the running of the gauge coupling. We show that a scalar unparticle of scaling dimension d contributes to the βfunction a term that is (2-d) times that from a scalar particle in the same representation. This result has important implications on asymptotic freedom. An unparticle with d>2, in contrast to its matter counterpart, can speed up the approach to asymptotic freedom for a non-Abelian gauge theory and has the tendency to make an Abelian theory also asymptotically free. For not spoiling the excellent agreement of the standard model (SM) with precision tests, the infrared cut-off, m, of such an unparticle would be high but might still be reachable at colliders such as LHC and ILC. Furthermore, if the unparticle scale Λ_\calU is high enough, unparticles could significantly modify the unification pattern of the SM gauge couplings. For instance, with 3 scalar unparticles of d\sim 2.5 in the adjoint representation of the strong gauge group but neutral under the electroweak one, the three gauge couplings would unify at a scale of \sim 8\times 10^{12} {\rm GeV}, which is several orders of magnitude below the supersymmetric unification scale.

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arXiv2008

Electromagnetic Dipole Moments and Radiative Decays of Particles from Exchange of Fermionic Unparticles

We construct the propagator for a free fermionic unparticle field from basic considerations of scale and Lorentz invariance. The propagator is fixed up to a normalization factor which is required to recover the result of a free massless fermion field in the canonical limit of the scaling dimension. Two new features appear compared to the bosonic case. The propagator contains both γand non-γterms, and there is a relative phase of π/2 between the two in the time-like regime for arbitrary scaling dimension. This should result in additional interference effects on top of the one known in the bosonic case. The non-γterm can mediate chirality flipped transitions that are not suppressed by a light fermion mass but are enhanced by a large bosonic mass in loops, compared to the pure particle case. We employ this last feature to set stringent bounds on the Yukawa couplings between a fermionic unparticle and an ordinary fermion through electromagnetic dipole moments and radiative decays of light fermions.

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arXiv2007

Long-range Electron Spin-spin Interactions from Unparticle Exchange

Unparticles as suggested by Georgi are identities that are not constrained by dispersion relations but are governed by their scaling dimension, d. Their coupling to particles can result in macroscopic interactions between matter, that are generally an inverse nonintegral power of distance. This is totally different from known macroscopic forces. We use the precisely measured long-ranged spin-spin interaction of electrons to constrain unparticle couplings to the electron. For 1<d<1.5 the axial vector unparticle coupling is excluded; and for 1<d<1.3 the pseudoscalar and vector couplings are also ruled out. These bounds and the ones for other ranges of d exceed or are complementary to those obtained previously from exotic positronium decays.

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arXiv2007

Bounds on Unparticles Couplings to Electrons: from Electron g-2 to Positronium Decays

Unparticles as suggested recently by Georgi have surprising phenomenological implications, distinctive from any other new physics that we know of. But they must interact very feebly with ordinary matter to have avoided detection thus far. We determine how feebly they can interact with the electron, using the precisely measured quantities in QED: the electron g-2 and the bounds on invisible and exotic positronium decays. The most stringent bound comes from invisible ortho-positronium decays: the effective energy scale entering the vector unparticle-electron interaction must exceed 4 x 10^5 TeV for a scaling dimension 3/2 of the vector unparticle. The lower bounds on scales for other unparticles range from a few tens to a few hundreds TeV. This makes the detection of unparticles challenging in low energy electron systems.

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arXiv2007

Impact of spin-zero particle-photon interactions on light polarization in external magnetic fields

If the recent PVLAS results on polarization changes of a linearly polarized laser beam passing through a magnetic field are interpreted by an axion-like particle, it is almost certain that it is not a standard QCD axion. Considering this, we study the general effective interactions of photons with spin-zero particles without restricting the latter to be a pseudo-scalar or a scalar, i.e., a parity eigenstate. At the lowest order in effective field theory, there are two dimension-5 interactions, each of which has previously been treated separately for a pseudo-scalar or a scalar particle. By following the evolution in an external magnetic field of the system of spin-zero particles and photons, we compute the changes in light polarization and the transition probability for two experimental set-ups: one-way propagation and round-trip propagation. While the first may be relevant for astrophysical sources of spin-zero particles, the second applies to laboratory optical experiments like PVLAS. In the one-way propagation, interesting phenomena can occur for special configurations of polarization where, for instance, transition occurs but light polarization does not change. For the round-trip propagation, however, the standard results of polarization changes for a pseudoscalar or a scalar are only modified by a factor that depends on the relative strength of the two interactions.

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arXiv2007

Effective field theory approach to light propagation in an external magnetic field

The recent PVLAS experiment observed the rotation of polarization and the ellipticity when a linearly polarized laser beam passes through a transverse magnetic field. The phenomenon cannot be explained in the conventional QED. We attempt to accommodate the result by employing an effective theory for the electromagnetic field alone. No new particles with a mass of order the laser frequency or below are assumed. To quartic terms in the field strength, a parity-violating term appears besides the two ordinary terms. The rotation of polarization and ellipticity are computed for parity asymmetric and symmetric experimental set-ups. While rotation occurs in an ideal asymmetric case and has the same magnitude as the ellipticity, it disappears in a symmetric set-up like PVLAS. This would mean that we have to appeal to some low-mass new particles with nontrivial interactions with photons to understand the PVLAS result.

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