Astrophysics

Lattice QCD in this decade has succeeded in producing essential results for crucial components of Standard Model phenomenology such as constraints on the rho-eta plane. Much more will be required of lattice gauge theory in the LHC era: sub-per cent precision in QCD quantities and the ability to calculate in strongly interacting sectors of Beyond-the-Standard-Model theories such as SUSY or technicolor. I will review the status of current calculations and the prospects for accomplishing what needs to be done in the coming years.

The Higgs boson is the only scalar particle in the Standard Model. Precision electroweak analyses suggest that it should be light -- less than 200 GeV. These facts combined with the speculative nature of all electroweak symmetry breaking discussions imply significant uncertainty in discovering a Higgs boson. I discuss the unique aspects of a Higgs sector, highlight the New Physics origins of uncertainty for its phenomenology, and suggest a broader framework with which to approach Higgs boson phenomenology at the LHC.

The smaller Dark Matter structures predicted in the CDM scenario have a mass in the range [10e-12;10e-4] Msun, depending on the underlying particle physics. It is however not clear what is the inner DM structure of such halos, nor which is the real survival probability during mergers. We show how these open questions result in a large uncertainty in the prediction of the observability of such halos with indirect detection tecniques. We show predictions for the observability of the dwarf galaxies using dark matter density profiles derived from the available data on velocity dispersion curves.

We formulate non-anticommutative supersymmetry in two dimensions using differential operators acting on the component fields. We then use these operators to give a compact expression for the one-loop divergences in the non-anticommutative Kahler sigma model.

It is an important task to embed inflation in a fundamental microphysical theory such as string theory. Since string theory possesses a vast landscape of 4-dimensional theories, we would like to know which portions contain inflation and which do not. I prove a no-go theorem that inflation and de Sitter vacua are forbidden in an exponentially large number of infinite families of simple and well understood compactifications of type IIA string theory. I also mention more complicated and less well understood compactifications, which may have the ingredients for our cosmology.

If the spontaneous breaking of Peccei-Quinn symmetry comes from soft supersymmetry breaking, the fermionic partners of the symmetry-breaking fields have mass of order the gravitino mass, and are called flatinos. The lightest flatino, called here the flaxino, is a CDM candidate if it is the lightest supersymmetric particle. We here explore flaxino dark matter assuming that the lightest ordinary supersymmetric particle is the stau, with gravity-mediated supersymmetry breaking. The decay of the stau to the flaxino is fast enough not to spoil the standard predictions of Big Bang Nucleosynthesis, and its track and decay can be seen in future colliders.