High Energy Physics

We utilize the tools of the gauge/gravity correspondence in order to investigate electroweak symmetry breaking (EWSB). For quite some time now, a walking technicolor sector has been viewed by phenomenologists as a very promising alternative to the Higgs boson. Unfortunately however, no precise computations have been possible since in the technicolor gauge theory EWSB is due to strong-coupling dynamics. Using recent developments in the gauge/gravity duality, we construct a gravity dual of a walking technicolor model and aim to compute the Peskin-Takeuchi S-parameter, which is an observable that can distinguish between a Higgs and a technicolor sector.

Recently there has been great interest in calculating transport coefficients for field theories at large coupling, using AdS/CFT. In this talk I will discuss recent work showing how to use the membrane paradigm to easily compute the shear viscosity and conductivity in arbitrary gravity theories. In a certain sense these can be thought of as effective couplings at the black hole horizon dual to the field theory plasma. An explicit Wald-like formula for these couplings is given for a large class of generalized gravity theories.

In generalized models of gauge-mediated supersymmetry breaking, a standard model-like Higgs boson can decay to pairs of neutralino superpartners. If the energy scale of supersymmetry breaking is very low, each of these neutralinos will subsequently decay promptly to a photon and a gravitino. This process gives rise to a collider signal consisting of a pair of photons and missing energy. In this talk I will describe scenarios of supersymmetry breaking that can give rise this signature and other non-standard Higgs decay modes, and discuss how it might be discovered with upcoming data from the Tevatron and the LHC.

The calculation of soft supersymmery breaking terms type IIB string theoretic models is discussed. Both classical and quantum contributions are evaluated. The suppression of FCNC gives a lower bound on the size of the compactification volume. Essentially what is obtained is a sequestered theory with the dominant pattern of soft masses and gaugino masses being that expected from AMSB and gaugino mediation with a gravitino mass around 100TeV.