High Energy Physics

Theories of gravity having connection as an independent dynamical variable can have a massive spin -2 particle together with the massless graviton in their spectrum. We study the potentiality of such models as a consistent infrared modification of gravity. It will be shown that these models are free from ghost like Boulware-Deser mode in the background of arbitrary torsionless Einstein manifolds. At least for weak for weak enough curvature the dangerous spin zero mode has a healthy kinetic energy in our backgrounds. vDVZ singularity seems to be a generic feature which may be cured by Vainshtein mechanism as in other infrared modified theories of gravity.

We consider a codimension-2 brane inflation scenario in a warped flux compactification of 6D gauged supergravity. The volume modulus of the model is stabilized by means of potentials localized on the regularized background branes. We discuss the cosmological evolution of the world-volume of a probe codimension-2 brane when it moves along the radial direction of the internal space. In order to have slow-roll inflation, we find that the warping of the internal space is required to be weak, in contrast to the string inflation constructions with strong warping. We discuss the parameter range that the inflation is in agreement with the observationally inferred parameters and which furthermore is consistent with the probe brane approximation. We argue that from a multi-brane solution, the backreaction of the probe brane on the weak warp factor is ignorable

Models with two supersymmetric large extra dimensions (SLED) may provide a way to approach both the cosmological constant problem and dark energy. After reviewing these ideas, I shall discuss warped brane world solutions in 6D supergravity, as a laboratory in which to explore SLED and codimension two branes in general. Solving the linearized perturbations for all the bosonic fields, and some of the fermions, we can observe how the corresponding physics compares with 5D models and standard Kaluza-Klein compactifications. These results should help to better our understanding of the cancellations in the 4D effective vacuum energy with SLED.

Gauge theories with deformed products of fields in the lagrangian constitute an interesting generalization of the gauge/string duality. We review a systematic procedure to find the string duals of such theories, called the TsT transformation, and illustrate its properties by means of a few examples.

It is well known that new physics at the electroweak scale could solve important puzzles in cosmology, such as the nature of dark matter and the origin of the cosmic baryon asymmetry. In this talk, I discuss some of the simplest, non-supersymmetric possibilities, their collider signatures, and the prospects for their discovery and identification at the LHC.

Recently methods of integrability were shown to be useful for solving gauge theories in various dimensions. I will make an introduction into integrability in two dimensions and demonstrate how the integrability works also for some three and four dimensional gauge theories.

A modified version of PQCD considered in previous works is further investigated in the case of a vanishing gluon condensate, by retaining only the quark one. In this case the Green functions generating functional is expressed in a simple form in which Dirac’s delta functions are now absent from the free propagators. The new expansion implements the dimensional transmutation effect through a single interaction vertex in addition to the standard ones in mass less QCD. The results of an ongoing two loop evaluation of the vacuum energy will be presented. The potential is parameterized as a function of the quark mass (defined by the pole of the first corrections to the quark propagator), the assumed finite zero momentum limit of the coupling constant g and the dimensional regularization parameter. The first condensate dependent corrections to the gluon and quark self-energies and propagators are evaluated. Assuming the possibility of fixing a minimum of the potential at the experimental value of the top quark mass =173 GeV, we evaluate the pole of the simplest correction to the propagator of the composite operator describing the quark condensate. Then, alter adopting the idea from the former top condensate models, in which the Higgs field corresponds to the quark condensate, the obtained pole gave a first rough estimate for the Higgs mass =168.2 GeV. Although being inside of the recently experimentally excluded region: 160-170 GeV, this mass value has the chance of being modified by a better approximation being currently considered for the gluon propagator entering its evaluation.

Integrability in gauge/string dualities will be reviewed in a broad perspective with a particular emphasis on the recently proposed equations describing the full planar spectrum of anomalous dimensions in AdS/CFT [N.Gromov, V.Kazakov, PV]. These are a concise version of Thermodynamic Bethe equations, called Y-system, which generalize the asymptotic Bethe equations of Beisert and Staudacher (which yield the full spectrum of N=4 SYM for asymptotically long local operators) and incorporate the 4-loop results for the shortest twist two operators obtained by Bajnok and Janik from the dual string sigma model (thus reproducing perturbative gauge theory computations with thousands of diagrams). On the way, we will explain some of the interesting open problems in the field.

Particle physics, cosmology, and the study of a wide variety of theoretical models – most notably ones involving extra dimensions of space. Randall works on several of the competing models of string theory in the quest to explain the fabric of the universe.