Search results for "Particle Physics"
showing 10 items of 6826 documents
Dark Sectors and New, Light, Weakly-Coupled Particles
2013
Dark sectors, consisting of new, light, weakly-coupled particles that do not interact with the known strong, weak, or electromagnetic forces, are a particularly compelling possibility for new physics. Nature may contain numerous dark sectors, each with their own beautiful structure, distinct particles, and forces. This review summarizes the physics motivation for dark sectors and the exciting opportunities for experimental exploration. It is the summary of the Intensity Frontier subgroup "New, Light, Weakly-coupled Particles" of the Community Summer Study 2013 (Snowmass). We discuss axions, which solve the strong CP problem and are an excellent dark matter candidate, and their generalizatio…
Femtolensing by dark matter revisited
2018
Femtolensing of gamma ray bursts (GRBs) has been put forward as an exciting possibility to probe exotic astrophysical objects with masses below $10^{-13}$ solar masses such as small primordial black holes or ultra-compact dark matter minihalos, made up for instance of QCD axions. In this paper we critically review this idea, properly taking into account the extended nature of the source as well as wave optics effects. We demonstrate that most GRBs are inappropriate for femtolensing searches due to their large sizes. This removes the previous femtolensing bounds on primordial black holes, implying that vast regions of parameter space for primordial black hole dark matter are not robustly con…
Cosmological lepton asymmetry with a nonzero mixing angle \theta13
2012
While the baryon asymmetry of the Universe is nowadays well measured by cosmological observations, the bounds on the lepton asymmetry in the form of neutrinos are still significantly weaker. We place limits on the relic neutrino asymmetries using some of the latest cosmological data, taking into account the effect of flavor oscillations. We present our results for two different values of the neutrino mixing angle \theta_{13}, and show that for large \theta_{13} the limits on the total neutrino asymmetry become more stringent, diluting even large initial flavor asymmetries. In particular, we find that the present bounds are still dominated by the limits coming from Big Bang Nucleosynthesis, …
Cosmological analogies in the search for new physics in high-energy collisions
2020
In this paper, analogies between multiparticle production in high-energy collisions and the time evolution of the early universe are discussed. A common explanation is put forward under the assumption of an unconventional early state: a rapidly expanding universe before recombination (last scattering surface), followed by the CMB, later evolving up to present days, versus the formation of hidden/dark states in hadronic collisions followed by a conventional QCD parton shower yielding final-state particles. In particular, long-range angular correlations are considered pointing out deep connections between the two physical cases potentially useful for the discovery of new physics.
Electroweak baryogenesis from a dark sector
2017
Adding an extra singlet scalar $S$ to the Higgs sector can provide a barrier at tree level between a false vacuum with restored electroweak symmetry and the true one. This has been demonstrated to readily give a strong phase transition as required for electroweak baryogenesis. We show that with the addition of a fermionic dark matter particle $\chi$ coupling to $S$, a simple UV-complete model can realize successful electroweak baryogenesis. The dark matter gets a CP asymmetry that is transferred to the standard model through a $CP\ portal\ interaction$, which we take to be a coupling of $\chi$ to $\tau$ leptons and an inert Higgs doublet. The CP asymmetry induced in left-handed $\tau$ lepto…
Prospects for discovering supersymmetric long-lived particles with MoEDAL
2020
We present a study on the possibility of searching for long-lived supersymmetric partners with the MoEDAL experiment at the LHC. MoEDAL is sensitive to highly ionising objects such as magnetic monopoles or massive (meta)stable electrically charged particles. We focus on prospects of directly detecting long-lived sleptons in a phenomenologically realistic model which involves an intermediate neutral long-lived particle in the decay chain. This scenario is not yet excluded by the current data from ATLAS or CMS, and is compatible with astrophysical constraints. Using Monte Carlo simulation, we compare the sensitivities of MoEDAL versus ATLAS in scenarios where MoEDAL could provide discovery re…
Robust constraint on Lorentz violation using Fermi-LAT gamma-ray burst data
2018
Models of quantum gravity suggest that the vacuum should be regarded as a medium with quantum structure that may have non-trivial effects on photon propagation, including the violation of Lorentz invariance. Fermi Large Area Telescope (LAT) observations of gamma-ray bursts (GRBs) are sensitive probes of Lorentz invariance, via studies of energy-dependent timing shifts in their rapidly-varying photon emissions. In this paper we analyze the Fermi-LAT measurements of high-energy gamma rays from GRBs with known redshifts, allowing for the possibility of energy-dependent variations in emission times at the sources as well as a possible non-trivial refractive index in vacuo for photons. We use st…
Probing secret interactions of eV-scale sterile neutrinos with the diffuse supernova neutrino background
2020
Sterile neutrinos with mass in the eV-scale and large mixings of order $\theta_0\simeq 0.1$ could explain some anomalies found in short-baseline neutrino oscillation data. Here, we revisit a neutrino portal scenario in which eV-scale sterile neutrinos have self-interactions via a new gauge vector boson $\phi$. Their production in the early Universe via mixing with active neutrinos can be suppressed by the induced effective potential in the sterile sector. We study how different cosmological observations can constrain this model, in terms of the mass of the new gauge boson, $M_\phi$, and its coupling to sterile neutrinos, $g_s$. Then, we explore how to probe part of the allowed parameter spa…
Galactic Cosmic-Ray Anisotropy in the Northern hemisphere from the ARGO-YBJ Experiment during 2008-2012
2018
This paper reports on the observation of the sidereal large-scale anisotropy of cosmic rays using data collected by the ARGO-YBJ experiment over 5 years (2008-2012). This analysis extends previous work limited to the period from 2008 January to 2009 December, near the minimum of solar activity between cycles 23 and 24. With the new data sample, the period of solar cycle 24 from near minimum to maximum is investigated. A new method is used to improve the energy reconstruction, allowing us to cover a much wider energy range, from 4 to 520 TeV. Below 100 TeV, the anisotropy is dominated by two wide regions, the so-called “tail-in” and “loss-cone” features. At higher energies, a dramatic change…
Search for microscopic black holes in a like-sign dimuon final state using large track multiplicity with the ATLAS detector
2013
A search is presented for microscopic black holes in a like-sign dimuon final state in proton-proton collisions at √s= 8 TeV. The data were collected with the ATLAS detector at the Large Hadron Collider in 2012 and correspond to an integrated luminosity of 20.3 fb-1. Using a high track multiplicity requirement, 0.6±0.2 background events from Standard Model processes are predicted and none observed. This result is interpreted in the context of low-scale gravity models and 95% CL lower limits on microscopic black hole masses are set for different model assumptions.