Search results for "physics beyond the standard model"
showing 10 items of 449 documents
VBFNLO: A parton level Monte Carlo for processes with electroweak bosons
2009
VBFNLO is a fully flexible parton level Monte Carlo program for the simulation of vector boson fusion, double and triple vector boson production in hadronic collisions at next-to-leading order in the strong Coupling constant. VBFNLO includes Higgs and vector boson decays with full spin correlations and all off-shell effects. In addition, VBFNLO implements CP-even and CP-odd Higgs boson via gluon fusion, associated with two jets, at the leading-order one-loop level with the full top- and bottom-quark mass dependence in a generic two-Higgs-doublet model. A variety of effects arising from beyond the Standard Model physics are implemented for selected processes. This includes anomalous coupling…
Postinflationary vacuum instability and Higgs-inflaton couplings
2016
The Higgs-inflaton coupling plays an important role in the Higgs field dynamics in the early Universe. Even a tiny coupling generated at loop level can have a dramatic effect on the fate of the electroweak vacuum. Such Higgs-inflaton interaction is present both at the trilinear and quartic levels in realistic reheating models. In this work, we examine the Higgs dynamics during the preheating epoch, focusing on the effects of the parametric and tachyonic resonances. We use lattice simulations and other numerical tools in our studies. We find that the resonances can induce large fluctuations of the Higgs field which destabilize the electroweak vacuum. Our considerations thus provide an upper …
Toward (finally!) ruling out Z and Higgs mediated dark matter models
2016
In recent years, direct detection, indirect detection, and collider experiments have placed increasingly stringent constraints on particle dark matter, exploring much of the parameter space associated with the WIMP paradigm. In this paper, we focus on the subset of WIMP models in which the dark matter annihilates in the early universe through couplings to either the Standard Model $Z$ or the Standard Model Higgs boson. Considering fermionic, scalar, and vector dark matter candidates within a model-independent context, we find that the overwhelming majority of these dark matter candidates are already ruled out by existing experiments. In the case of $Z$ mediated dark matter, the only scenari…
Early Universe Higgs dynamics in the presence of the Higgs-inflaton and non-minimal Higgs-gravity couplings
2017
Apparent metastability of the electroweak vacuum poses a number of cosmological questions. These concern evolution of the Higgs field to the current vacuum, and its stability during and after inflation. Higgs-inflaton and non-minimal Higgs-gravity interactions can make a crucial impact on these considerations potentially solving the problems. In this work, we allow for these couplings to be present simultaneously and study their interplay. We find that different combinations of the Higgs-inflaton and non-minimal Higgs-gravity couplings induce effective Higgs mass during and after inflation. This crucially affects the Higgs stability considerations during preheating. In particular, a wide ra…
Search for a heavy neutral particle decaying into an electron and a muon using 1 fb−1 of ATLAS data
2011
A search is presented for a high mass neutral particle that decays directly to the e±μ∓ final state. The data sample was recorded by the ATLAS detector in s√=7~TeVpp collisions at the LHC from March to June 2011 and corresponds to an integrated luminosity of 1.07 fb−1. The data are found to be consistent with the Standard Model background. The high e±μ∓ mass region is used to set 95% confidence level upper limits on the production of two possible new physics processes: tau sneutrinos in an R-parity violating supersymmetric model and Z′-like vector bosons in a lepton flavor violating model.
Neutrinoless Double-Electron Capture
2020
Double-beta processes play a key role in the exploration of neutrino and weak interaction properties, and in the searches for effects beyond the Standard Model. During the last half century many attempts were undertaken to search for double-beta decay with emission of two electrons, especially for its neutrinoless mode ($0\nu2\beta^-$), the latter being still not observed. Double-electron capture (2EC) was not in focus so far because of its in general lower transition probability. However, the rate of neutrinoless double-electron capture ($0\nu2$EC) can experience a resonance enhancement by many orders of magnitude in case the initial and final states are energetically degenerate. In the re…
Short-range neutrinoless double beta decay mechanisms
2018
Neutrinoless double beta decay can significantly help to shed light on the issue of non-zero neutrino mass, as observation of this lepton number violating process would imply neutrinos are Majorana particles. However, the underlying interaction does not have to be as simple as the standard neutrino mass mechanism. The entire variety of neutrinoless double beta decay mechanisms can be approached effectively. In this work we focus on a theoretical description of short-range effective contributions to neutrinoless double beta decay, which are equivalent to 9-dimensional effective operators incorporating the appropriate field content. We give a detailed derivation of the nuclear matrix elements…
Hunt for new phenomena using large jet multiplicities and missing transverse momentum with ATLAS in 4.7 fb[superscript −1] of √s = 7 TeV proton-proto…
2012
Results are presented of a search for new particles decaying to large numbers of jets in association with missing transverse momentum, using 4.7 fb[superscript −1] of pp collision data at √s = 7 TeV collected by the ATLAS experiment at the Large Hadron Collider in 2011. The event selection requires missing transverse momentum, no isolated electrons or muons, and from ≥6 to ≥9 jets. No evidence is found for physics beyond the Standard Model. The results are interpreted in the context of a MSUGRA/CMSSM supersymmetric model, where, for large universal scalar mass m [subscript 0], gluino masses smaller than 840 GeV are excluded at the 95% confidence level, extending previously published limits.…
Effective Majorana mass matrix from tau and pseudoscalar meson lepton number violating decays
2018
An observation of any lepton number violating process will undoubtedly point towards the existence of new physics and indirectly to the clear Majorana nature of the exchanged fermion. In this work, we explore the potential of a minimal extension of the Standard Model via heavy sterile fermions with masses in the $[ 0.1 - 10]$ GeV range concerning an extensive array of "neutrinoless" meson and tau decay processes. We assume that the Majorana neutrinos are produced on-shell, and focus on three-body decays. We conduct an update on the bounds on the active-sterile mixing elements, $|U_{\ell_\alpha 4} U_{\ell_\beta 4}|$, taking into account the most recent experimental bounds (and constraints) a…
Double parton correlations and constituent quark models: a light front approach to the valence sector
2014
An explicit evaluation of the double parton distribution functions (dPDFs), within a relativistic Light-Front approach to constituent quark models, is presented. dPDFs encode information on the correlations between two partons inside a target and represent the non-perturbative QCD ingredient for the description of double parton scattering in proton-proton collisions, a crucial issue in the search of new Physics at the LHC. Valence dPDFs are evaluated at the low scale of the model and the perturbative scale of the experiments is reached by means of QCD evolution. The present results show that the strong correlation effects present at the scale of the model are still sizable, in the valence r…