Search results for "Physics Institute"
showing 9 items of 39 documents
Filtered Dark Matter at a First Order Phase Transition.
2020
We describe a new mechanism of dark matter production in the early Universe, based on the dynamics of a first order phase transition. We assume that dark matter particles acquire mass during the phase transition, making it energetically unfavourable for them to enter the expanding bubbles of the massive phase. Instead, most of them are reflected off the advancing bubble walls and quickly annihilate away in the massless phase. The bubbles eventually merge as the phase transition is completed, and only the dark matter particles which have entered the bubbles survive to constitute the observed dark matter today. This mechanism can produce dark matter with masses from the GeV scale to above the…
Consistent Treatment of Axions in the Weak Chiral Lagrangian.
2021
We present a consistent implementation of weak decays involving an axion or axion-like particle in the context of an effective chiral Lagrangian. We argue that previous treatments of such processes have used an incorrect representation of the flavor-changing quark currents in the chiral theory. As an application, we derive model-independent results for the decays $K^-\to\pi^- a$ and $\pi^-\to e^-\bar\nu_e a$ at leading order in the chiral expansion and for arbitrary axion couplings and mass. In particular, we find that the $K^-\to\pi^- a$ branching ratio is almost 40 times larger than previously estimated.
ZZ production at hadron colliders in NNLO QCD
2014
We report on the first calculation of next-to-next-to-leading order (NNLO) QCD corrections to the inclusive production of ZZ pairs at hadron colliders. Numerical results are presented for pp collisions with centre-of-mass energy ($\sqrt{s}$) ranging from 7 to 14 TeV. The NNLO corrections increase the NLO result by an amount varying from $11\%$ to $17\%$ as $\sqrt{s}$ goes from 7 to 14 TeV. The loop-induced gluon fusion contribution provides about $60\%$ of the total NNLO effect. When going from NLO to NNLO the scale uncertainties do not decrease and remain at the $\pm 3\%$ level.
Transverse-momentum resummation for vector-boson pair production at NNLL+NNLO
2015
We consider the transverse-momentum ($p_T$) distribution of $ZZ$ and $W^+W^-$ boson pairs produced in hadron collisions. At small $p_T$, the logarithmically enhanced contributions due to multiple soft-gluon emission are resummed to all orders in QCD perturbation theory. At intermediate and large values of $p_T$, we consistently combine resummation with the known fixed-order results. We exploit the most advanced perturbative information that is available at present: next-to-next-to-leading logarithmic resummation combined with the next-to-next-to-leading fixed-order calculation. After integration over $p_T$, we recover the known next-to-next-to-leading order result for the inclusive cross se…
Two-Loop Planar Corrections to Heavy-Quark Pair Production in the Quark-Antiquark Channel
2009
We evaluate the planar two-loop QCD diagrams contributing to the leading color coefficient of the heavy-quark pair production cross section, in the quark-antiquark annihilation channel. We obtain the leading color coefficient in an analytic form, in terms of one- and two-dimensional harmonic polylogarithms of maximal weight 4. The result is valid for arbitrary values of the Mandelstam invariants s and t, and of the heavy-quark mass m. Our findings agree with previous analytic results in the small-mass limit and numerical results for the exact amplitude.
The forward-backward asymmetry for massive bottom quarks at the $Z$ peak at next-to-next-to-leading order QCD
2017
We compute the order $\alpha_s^2$ QCD corrections to the $b$-quark forward-backward asymmetry in $e^+e^-\to b{\bar b}$ collisions at the $Z$ boson resonance, taking the non-zero mass of the $b$ quark into account. We determine these corrections with respect to both the $b$-quark axis and the thrust axis definition of the asymmetry. We compute also the distributions of these axes with respect to the electron beam. If one neglects the flavor singlet contributions to the $b$-quark asymmetry, as was done in previous computations for massless $b$ quarks, then the second-order QCD corrections for $m_b\neq 0$ are smaller in magnitude than the corresponding corrections for $m_b=0$. Including the si…
Flavor Non-universal Pati-Salam Unification and Neutrino Masses
2021
We analyze the neutrino mass spectrum and discuss the extra-dimensional interpretation of a three-site Pati-Salam model which i) unifies all families of quark and leptons, ii) provides a natural description of the Standard Model Yukawa couplings, iii) could account for the recent $B$-physics anomalies. The key feature of the model is a breaking of the Pati-Salam and electroweak gauge symmetries localized on opposite sites, communicated to the other sites in an attenuated manner via nearest-neighbor interactions. We show that in this context gauge-singlet fermions localized on each site, receiving hierarchical Majorana masses, can allow the implementation of an inverse seesaw mechanism leadi…
First measurement of the charge asymmetry in beauty-quark pair production.
2014
The difference in the angular distributions between beauty quarks and antiquarks, referred to as the charge asymmetry, is measured for the first time in b[bar over b] pair production at a hadron collider. The data used correspond to an integrated luminosity of 1.0 fb[superscript −1] collected at 7 TeV center-of-mass energy in proton-proton collisions with the LHCb detector. The measurement is performed in three regions of the invariant mass of the b[bar over b] system. The results obtained are A[b[bar over b] over C](40 105 GeV/c[superscript 2]) = 1.6 ± 1.7 ± 0.6%, where A[b[bar over b] over C] is defined as the asymmetry in the difference in rapidity between jets formed from the beauty q…
GW170817: Observation of Gravitational Waves from a Binary Neutron Star Inspiral
2017
On August 17, 2017 at 12-41:04 UTC the Advanced LIGO and Advanced Virgo gravitational-wave detectors made their first observation of a binary neutron star inspiral. The signal, GW170817, was detected with a combined signal-to-noise ratio of 32.4 and a false-alarm-rate estimate of less than one per 8.0×104 years. We infer the component masses of the binary to be between 0.86 and 2.26 M, in agreement with masses of known neutron stars. Restricting the component spins to the range inferred in binary neutron stars, we find the component masses to be in the range 1.17-1.60 M, with the total mass of the system 2.74-0.01+0.04M. The source was localized within a sky region of 28 deg2 (90% probabili…