Abstract: Abundant phenomenology suggests that strong decays from relatively low-excitation hadrons into other hadrons proceed by the creation of a light quark-antiquark pair with zero total angular momentum, the so called 3P0 mechanism originating from a scalar bilinear. Yet the quantum chromodynamics (QCD) interaction is perturbatively mediated by gluons of spin one, and QCD presents a chirally symmetric Lagrangian. Such scalar decay term must be spontaneously generated upon breaking chiral symmetry. We attempt to reproduce this with the help of the quark-gluon vertex in Landau gauge, whose nonperturbative structure has been reasonably elucidated in the last years, and insertions of a uniform, constant chromoelectric field. This is akin to Schwinger pair production in quantum electrodynamics (QED), and we provide a comparison with its two field-insertions diagram. We find that, the symmetry being cylindrical, the adequate quantum numbers to discuss the production are rather 3E0, 3E1, and 3110 as in diatomic molecules, and we indeed find a sizeable contribution of the third decay mechanism, which may give a rationale for the 3P0 phenomenology, as long as the momentum of the produced pair is at or below the scale of the bare or dynamically generated fermion mass. On the other hand, ultrarelativistic fermions are rather ejected with 3E1 quantum numbers. In QED, our results suggest that 3E0 dominates, whereas the constraint of producing a color singlet in QCD leads to 3110 dominance at sub-GeV momenta.

Abstract: Adding a scalar triplet to the Standard Model is one of the simplest ways of giving mass to neutrinos, providing at the same time a mechanism to stabilize the theory's vacuum. In this paper, we revisit these aspects of the type-II seesaw model pointing out that the bounded-from-below conditions for the scalar potential in use in the literature are not correct. We discuss some scenarios where the correction can be significant and sketch the typical scalar boson profile expected by consistency.

Abstract: After four years of data taking, the IceCube neutrino telescope has detected 54 high-energy starting events (HESE, or contained-vertex events) with deposited energies above 20 TeV. They represent the first detection of high-energy extraterrestrial neutrinos and, therefore, the first step in neutrino astronomy. To study the energy, flavor, and isotropy of the astrophysical neutrino flux arriving at Earth, we perform different analyses of two different deposited energy intervals, [10 TeV-10 PeV] and [60 TeV-10 PeV]. We first consider an isotropic unbroken power-law spectrum and constrain its shape, normalization, and flavor composition. Our results are in agreement with the preliminary IceCube results, although we obtain a slightly softer spectrum. We also find that current data are not sensitive to a possible neutrino-antineutrino asymmetry in the astrophysical flux. Then, we show that although a two-component power-law model leads to a slightly better fit, it does not represent a significant improvement with respect to a single power-law flux. Finally, we analyze the possible existence of a north-south asymmetry, hinted at by the combination of the HESE sample with the throughgoing muon data. If we use only HESE data, the scarce statistics from the Northern Hemisphere does not allow us to reach any conclusive answer, which indicates that the HESE sample alone is not driving the potential north-south asymmetry.

Abstract: All extensions of the standard model that generate Majorana neutrino masses at the electroweak scale introduce some heavy mediators, either fermions and/or scalars, weakly coupled to leptons. Here, by “heavy,” we mean implicitly the mass range between a few 100 GeV up to, say, roughly 2 TeV, such that these particles can be searched for at the LHC. We study decay widths of these mediators for several different tree-level neutrino mass models. The models we consider range from the simplest d = 5 seesaw up to d = 11 neutrino mass models. For each of the models, we identify the most interesting parts of the parameter space, where the heavy mediator fields are particularly long lived and can decay with experimentally measurable decay lengths. One has to distinguish two different scenarios, depending on whether fermions or scalars are the lighter of the heavy particles. For fermions, we find that the decay lengths correlate with the inverse of the overall neutrino mass scale. Thus, since no lower limit on the lightest neutrino mass exists, nearly arbitrarily long decay lengths can be obtained for the case in which fermions are the lighter of the heavy particles. For charged scalars, on the other hand, there exists a maximum value for the decay length in these models. This maximum value depends on the model and on the electric charge of the scalar under consideration but can at most be of the order of a few millimeters. Interestingly, independent of the model, this maximum occurs always in a region of parameter space, where leptonic and gauge boson final states have similar branching ratios, i.e., where the observation of lepton number-violating final states from scalar decays is possible.

Abstract: Among the newly observed structures in the heavy-quarkonium mass region, some have been proposed to be hadronic molecules. We investigate the consequences of heavy- quark flavor symmetry on these heavy meson hadronic molecules. The symmetry allows us to predict new hadronic molecules on one hand, and test the hadronic molecular assumption of the observed structures on the other hand. We explore the consequences of the flavor symmetry assuming the X(3872) and Z(b)(10 610) as an isoscalar D (D) over bar* and isovector B (B) over bar* hadronic molecule, respectively. A series of hadronic molecules composed of heavy mesons are predicted. In particular, there is an isoscalar 1(++) B (B) over bar* bound state with a mass about 10 580 MeV which may be searched for in the Y(1S, 2S)pi(+) pi(-) pi(0) mass distribution; the isovector charmonium partners of the Z(b)(10 610) and the Z(b)(10 650) are also predicted, which probably corresponds to the very recently observed Z(c)(3900) and Z(c)(4025) resonances by the BESIII Collaboration.