High Energy Physics

In this talk, I will discuss various aspects of UV-complete R-symmetric QFTs. In particular, I will focus on a small set of operators that are well-defined in many such theories, and I will argue that one can use these operators to get a (partial) non-perturbative handle on the deep IR physics, including, possibly, a handle on certain aspects of the emergent symmetries. Throughout, I will highlight applications to particle physics.

The full machinery of supergravity (SUGRA) is required to fully understand many supersymmetric models. For the purpose of understanding phenomenology at colliders and in cosmology, the main concern is to ascertain the effects of SUGRA on the vacuum structure and particle spectrum. Practical calculations often require cumbersome manipulations of component field terms involving the full gravity multiplet. In this talk I will present an alternative gauge fixing for conformal SUGRA which decouples these gravity complications from SUGRA computations. This yields a simplified tree-level action for the matter fields in SUGRA which can be expressed compactly in terms of superfields and a modified conformal compensator. As a concrete application I will finally show the example of the mass spectrum of goldstini arising from a general admixture of F-term, D-term, and almost no-scale supersymmetry breaking.

I will discuss how to construct a consistent effective field theory when the differing modes of the theory have the same invariant mass scale. I will sketch some phenomenological applications of the formalism relevant for the LHC.

After a short introduction to general gauge mediation, we use the operator product expansion (OPE) to explore the dynamics of the hidden sector of SUSY breaking, much like the OPE is used in e+e- scattering to hadrons in QCD. Along the way we derive consequences that the N=1 superconformal symmetry puts on three-point functions of two current superfields with an arbitrary superconformal primary operator. Using those constraints we construct a ``supermultiplet'' of OPEs. Finally, we give approximations to soft masses, which can be used even in strongly-coupled theories.  
References: arXiv:1107.1721, 1109.4940

I will present a class of models in which the dark matter particle carries flavor quantum numbers, and has renormalizable contact interactions with Standard Model fields. In particular, I will focus on models where the dark matter flavor is identified with lepton flavor in the Standard Model. The region of parameter space where the dark matter has the right abundance to be a thermal relic is accessible at current direct detection experiments. A full simulation of the signal and backgrounds, including detector effects, shows that in a significant part of parameter space these theories can be discovered above Standard Model backgrounds at the LHC. Further, flavor and charge correlations among the final state leptons might allow models of this type to be distinguished from theories where dark matter couples to leptons but does not carry flavor.

We study the constraints imposed by the existence of a single higher spin conserved current on a three dimensional conformal field theory. A single higher spin conserved current implies the existence of an infinite number of higher spin conserved currents. The correlation functions of the stress tensor and the conserved currents are then shown to be equal to those of a free field theory. Namely a theory of $N$ free bosons or free fermions. This is an extension of the Coleman-Mandula theorem to CFT's, which do not have a conventional S matrix. We also briefly discuss the case where the higher spin symmetries are ``slightly'' broken.

We present strategies of searching for supersymmetric non-standard decays of Standard Model (SM)-like Higgs bosons (h2) at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), motivated by ''Dark Light Higgs'' (DLH) scenario. The DLH sccenario represents a limit of the nearly-Peccei-Quinn-symmetric Next-to-Minimal Supersymmetric Standard Model, where there naturally co-exist two light singlet-like particles: a scalar (h1), a pseudoscalar (a1), and a light singlino-like DM candidate (\chi_1), all with masses of order 10 GeV or below. In this scenario, the SM-like Higgs boson typically decays dominantly into a pair of neutralinos, allowing themselves to be as light as below 100 GeV. We systematically study the searches of both the SM-like and the light Higgs bosons at the LHC, using the supersymmetric non-standard decay chains: h2 -> \chi_1 \chi_2, \chi_2 -> \chi_1 (h1, a1) with the h1 or a1 further decayed into a pair of fermions (including diMuon, diTau and b bbar, etc).

The channeling of the ion recoiling after a collision with a WIMP produces a larger ionization/scintillation signal in direct dark matter detection experiments than otherwise expected. I will present estimates of the channeling fractions and their impact on data fits. I will also discuss the possibility of having a daily modulation of the signal due to channeling. Since this modulation depends on the recoil directions and thus on the orientation of the detector with respect to the galaxy, it would be a background free signature. Finally, I will discuss other novel signatures which depend on the direction of recoils and are relevant for directional detectors: a ring of maximum recoil rate around the average arrival direction of WIMPs, aberration features and directional annual modulation amplitudes, in particular the North and South Galactic hemisphere annual modulation.