High Energy Physics

The Standard Model is currently the theory which describes the most fundamental constituents of matter and the forces which govern their interactions. Since the start-up of the LHC accelerator, the ATLAS detector has collected sufficient data to allow tests of this theory at the smallest distance scales ever probed. The objective is to find significant deviations between the observed data and the Standard Model predictions, revealing the existence of new phenomena. For example, some theories in which the universe has more than 4 space-time dimensions predict that LHC collisions could produce gravitons - the particles responsible for the gravitational interaction. Such events would feature a single jet of hadronic particles in the detector and a large amount of

A non-trivial test of the string vs. integrability correspondence is suggested: exact equivalence is established between strings in AdS4 x CP3 and the Gromov-Vieira all-loop integrable chain. To do that, the complete one- and two-magnon sector of each respective theory are calculated. In the single-magnon sector a direct perturbative one-loop calculation proves the validity of the dispersion law coming from the Bethe Ansatz, rather than of the one coming from the semiclassical analysis. In the two-magnon sector the full spectrum of the finite-size corrections has been calculated on the string side by us for the first time, that proves to be identical to the integrable chain spectrum. These results are interpreted by us as a confirmation of the exactness of the conjectured Gromov-Vieira Bethe Ansatz.

Critical theories of gravity are certain higher derivative theories in which parameters are so tuned as to eliminate massive excitations for the spin-2 field. Asymptotically AdS black hole entropy in these theories works out to be zero. We show that such theories arise naturally on the boundary of AdS in the form of counterterms. Such counterterms are derived by demanding cutoff independence of the Euclidean onshell action and black hole entropy. The resummed higher derivative action so obtained can be shown to be critical. Connections with log-CFTs will be discussed. For a specific choice of parameters, these theories turn out to be non-dynamical.

We propose models of symmetric WIMP dark matter in which dark matter annihilations generate the baryon asymmetry. We call this mechanism "WIMPy baryogenesis". This provides a dynamical connection between the late-time abundances of both dark matter and baryons. We construct explicit models of leptogenesis and baryogenesis at the weak scale, and find the "miraculous" result that, for order one couplings and weak scale masses for any new fields, the baryon asymmetry and dark matter relic density from WIMPy baryogenesis match the observed values. We also discuss implications for the LHC and dark matter detection experiments.