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: Despite the great progress of current cosmological measurements, the nature of the dominant component of the Universe, coined dark energy, is still an open question. Early dark energy is a possible candidate which may also alleviate some fine-tuning issues of the standard paradigm. Using the latest available cosmological data, we find that the 95% C.L. upper bound on the early dark energy density parameter is Tau(eDE) < 0.009. On the other hand, the dark energy component may be a stressed and inhomogeneous fluid. If this is the case, the effective sound speed and the viscosity parameters are unconstrained by current data. Future omniscopelike 21 cm surveys, combined with present cosmic microwave background data, could be able to distinguish between standard quintessence scenarios from other possible models with 2 sigma significance, assuming a non-negligible early dark energy contribution. The precision achieved on the Omega(eDE) parameter from these 21 cm probes could be below O(10%).

Abstract: The Dalitz plot analysis technique is used to study the resonant substructures of B- -> D+pi(-)pi(-) decays in a data sample corresponding to 3.0 fb(-1) of pp collision data recorded by the LHCb experiment during 2011 and 2012. A model-independent analysis of the angular moments demonstrates the presence of resonances with spins 1, 2 and 3 at high D+pi(-) mass. The data are fitted with an amplitude model composed of a quasi-model-independent function to describe the D+pi(-) S wave together with virtual contributions from the D*(2007)(0) and B*(0) states, and components corresponding to the D-2*(2460)(0), D-1*(2680)(0), D-3*(2760)(0) and D-2*(3000)(0) resonances. The masses and widths of these resonances are determined together with the branching fractions for their production in B- -> D+pi(-)pi(-) decays. The D+pi(-) S wave has phase motion consistent with that expected due to the presence of the D-0*(2400)(0) state. These results constitute the first observations of the D-3*(2760)(0) and D-2*(3000)(0) resonances, with significances of 10 sigma and 6.6 sigma, respectively.