Particle Physics

The T2K experiment studies neutrino properties by producing a beam of muon neutrinos and sending them 295 km across Japan to the Super-Kamiokande detector. En route, neutrinos undergo a transmutation known as “neutrino oscillations” wherein they can transition to two other species or flavours, electron and tau neutrinos. Starting in 2014, T2K has run with an antineutrino beam to study the corresponding antineutrino oscillations and the possibility that a  complex phase in the neutrino mass and flavour mixing may lead to differences in neutrino and antineutrino oscillations. Such a difference may provide a critical clue into how our universe came to be dominated by matter.  I will present the latest results from an analysis of T2K neutrino and antineutrino data taken through 2016 along with other recent results from other experiments, and discuss their implications for our understanding of neutrinos.

Lack of fine tuning in effective field theory does not ensure that a particular scenario is natural or even realizable in a UV complete theory of quantum gravity. Large field axion inflation appears natural from the effective field theory perspective, but I argue that it is tuned from a quantum gravity perspective. The argument is based on the Weak Gravity Conjecture (WGC), a conjectural universal feature of quantum gravity that is present in all known string theory examples. In the process, I highlight recent progress in understanding the WGC and related conjectures about the charged spectrum of quantum gravity and discuss other potential applications, both formal and phenomenological.

Supposing there exists no new physics stabilizing the weak scale, the Standard Model Higgs potential exhibits a true vacuum at large field values, rendering the electroweak vacuum metastable (i.e., long lived relative to the age of the Universe). While this scenario need not preclude our current existence, it may not reconcile with a period of large(ish)-field inflation---large fluctuations in the Higgs field, induced by the inflationary energy density, can lead to the field locally sampling the unstable/true vacuum part of the potential, with potentially disastrous consequences. Evaluating the extent to which large-field inflation and the Higgs vacuum instability are incompatible requires understanding (i) how Higgs fluctuations evolve during inflation and (ii) the fate of large local fluctuations that sample the part of the potential beyond the barrier that separates the electroweak and true vacua. In this talk, I will discuss both of these aspects, and explain the implications for large-field inflation.

In this talk, I will present a framework in which Weinberg's anthropic explanation of the cosmological constant problem also solves the hierarchy problem. The weak scale is selected by chiral dynamics that controls the stabilization of an extra dimension. When the Higgs vacuum expectation value is close to a fermion mass scale, the radius of an extra dimension becomes large, and develops an enhanced number of vacua available to scan the cosmological constant down to its observed value. The fermion sector that controls the size of the extra dimension consists of a pair of electroweak doublets and several singlets. These leptons satisfy approximate mass relations related to the weak scale and are accessible to the LHC and future colliders. At low energies, the radion necessarily appears as an unnaturally light scalar, in a range of masses and couplings accessible to fifth-force searches as well as scalar dark matter searches with atomic clocks and gravitational-wave detectors.

The fundamental constants of our universe may have been set to maximize the production of similar universes, through repeated parametric variation. In this context, I will advocate that by the time the maximum entropy producer in our universe has reached maximum complexity, the majority of its energy should be re-purposed towards the production of additional universes. This builds on elements of prior proposals, including cosmological natural selection, the nonsingular universe, and the causal entropic principle. The phenomena and properties of dark matter, which realizes this proposal by copious conversion of halo baryons to black holes in ten trillion years, will be discussed.

With the discovery of a Higgs like boson at LHC in 2012, and the lack of any statistically significant evidence of physics beyond the Standard Model so far,
effective field theory techniques to incorporate LHC, and other lower energy data, into a coherent field theory framework are clearly of interest. Recently, technical and practical hurdles in the way of developing the paradigm of the Standard Model Effective Field Theory (SMEFT) have fallen and a coherent and systematic approach to treating the Standard Model (SM) as a truly general EFT when considering LHC data has emerged. I will discuss some recent results related to this developing appraoch, spanning SMEFT loop corrections, operator basis (or not) and a global analysis of particle physics data in a flavour symmetric version of the SMEFT, that has grown to incorporate a large swath of pre LHC data. The (somewhat surprising) results inform our expectation as to what sort of SM deviations can be found at LHC consistent with this framework.

 

In this talk I will propose a new mechanism for thermal dark matter freezeout, termed Co-Decaying Dark Matter. Multi-component dark sectors with degenerate particles and out-of-equilibrium decays can co-decay to obtain the observed relic density. The dark matter density is exponentially depleted through the decay of nearly degenerate particles, rather than from Boltzmann suppression. The relic abundance is set by the dark matter annihilation cross-section, which is predicted to be boosted, and the decay rate of the dark sector particles. Finally, I'll present a simple model that realizes co-decaying dark matter. 

We discuss how to formulate a quantum field theory of dark energy interacting with dark matter. We show that the proposals based on the assumption that dark matter is made up of heavy particles with masses which are very sensitive to the value of dark energy are strongly constrained. Quintessence-generated long range forces and radiative stability of the quintessence potential require that such dark matter and dark energy are completely decoupled. However, if dark energy and a fraction of dark matter are very light axions, they can have significant mixings which are radiatively stable and perfectly consistent with quantum field theory. Such models can naturally occur in multi-axion realizations of monodromies. The mixings yield interesting signatures which are observable and are within current cosmological limits but could be constrained further by future observations.

Dark matter can be a thermal relic exponentially lighter than
the weak scale without being exponentially weakly coupled. I will present
three mechanisms to obtain light thermal dark matter with sizable
self-interactions and couplings to the Standard Model.

An unbroken U(1)' is a minimal possibility for a dark matter self interaction, and may even be associated with dark matter stability. However, such an interaction faces incredibly strong constraints due to collective plasma effects, which dominate over 2-to-2 scattering by an order-of-magnitude of orders-of-magnitude. I will discuss the physics of these collective effects, and show preliminary results of simulation. The constraint of such a self interaction is estimated to be nearly as weak as gravity. 

Effective field theories (EFT) are everywhere in particle physics. Given an EFT, the first question we ask is “what are all the operators consistent with the symmetries and degrees of freedom at a particular expansion order? In this talk I will show how this question can be attacked, and often answered, using an object called a Hilbert series.

Astrophysical observations spanning dwarf galaxies to galaxy clusters indicate that dark matter halos are less dense in their central regions compared to expectations from collisionless dark matter N-body simulations. Using detailed fits to dark matter halos of galaxies and clusters, we show that self-interacting dark matter may provide a consistent solution to the dark matter deficit problem across all scales, even though individual systems exhibit a wide diversity in halo properties.