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Celis, A., Cirigliano, V., & Passemar, E. (2014). Lepton flavor violation in the Higgs sector and the role of hadronic tau-lepton decays. Phys. Rev. D, 89(1), 013008–19pp.
Abstract: It has been pointed out recently that current low-energy constraints still allow for sizable flavor-changing decay rates of the 125 GeV boson into leptons, h -> tau l (l = e, mu). In this work we discuss the role of hadronic tau-lepton decays in probing lepton flavor violating couplings in the Higgs sector. At low energy, the effective Higgs coupling to gluons induced by heavy quarks contributes to hadronic tau decays, establishing a direct connection with the relevant process at the LHC, pp(gg) -> h -> tau l. Semileptonic transitions like tau -> l pi pi are sensitive to flavor-changing scalar couplings, while decays such as tau -> l eta((l)) probe pseudoscalar couplings, thus providing a useful low-energy handle to disentangle possible Higgs flavor violating signals at the LHC. As part of our analysis, we provide an appropriate description of all the relevant hadronic matrix elements needed to describe Higgs mediated tau -> pi pi transitions, improving over previous treatments in the literature.
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Cabrera, M. E., Casas, A., Ruiz de Austri, R., & Bertone, G. (2014). LHC and dark matter phenomenology of the NUGHM. J. High Energy Phys., 12(12), 114–39pp.
Abstract: We present a Bayesian analysis of the NUGHM, a supersymmetric scenario with non-universal gaugino masses and Higgs masses, including all the relevant experimental observables and dark matter constraints. The main merit of the NUGHM is that it essentially includes all the possibilities for dark matter (DM) candidates within the MSSM, since the neutralino and chargino spectrum -and composition- are as free as they can be in the general MSSM. We identify the most probable regions in the NUHGM parameter space, and study the associated phenomenology at the LHC and the prospects for DM direct detection. Requiring that the neutralino makes all of the DM in the Universe, we identify two preferred regions around m(chi 10) = 1 TeV, 3 TeV, which correspond to the (almost) pure Higgsino and wino case. There exist other marginal regions (e.g. Higgs-funnel), but with much less statistical weight. The prospects for detection at the LHC in this case are quite pessimistic, but future direct detection experiments like LUX and XENON1T, will be able to probe this scenario. In contrast, when allowing other DM components, the prospects for detection at the LHC become more encouraging – the most promising signals being, beside the production of gluinos and squarks, the production of the heavier chargino and neutralino states, which lead to WZ and same-sign WW final states – and direct detection remains a complementary, and even more powerful, way to probe the scenario.
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Arbelaez, C., Romao, J. C., Hirsch, M., & Malinsky, M. (2014). LHC-scale left-right symmetry and unification. Phys. Rev. D, 89(3), 035002–19pp.
Abstract: We construct a comprehensive list of nonsupersymmetric standard model extensions with a low-scale left-right (LR)-symmetric intermediate stage that may be obtained as simple low-energy effective theories within a class of renormalizable SO(10) grand unified theories. Unlike the traditional “minimal” LR models many of our example settings support a perfect gauge coupling unification even if the LR scale is in the LHC domain at a price of only (a few copies of) one or two types of extra fields pulled down to the TeV-scale ballpark. We discuss the main aspects of a potentially realistic model building conforming the basic constraints from the quark and lepton sector flavor structure, proton decay limits, etc. We pay special attention to the theoretical uncertainties related to the limited information about the underlying unified framework in the bottom-up approach, in particular, to their role in the possible extraction of the LR-breaking scale. We observe a general tendency for the models without new colored states in the TeV domain to be on the verge of incompatibility with the proton stability constraints.
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Adey, D. et al, Cervera-Villanueva, A., Donini, A., Ghosh, T., Gomez-Cadenas, J. J., Hernandez, P., et al. (2014). Light sterile neutrino sensitivity at the nuSTORM facility. Phys. Rev. D, 89(7), 071301–7pp.
Abstract: A facility that can deliver beams of electron and muon neutrinos from the decay of a stored muon beam has the potential to unambiguously resolve the issue of the evidence for light sterile neutrinos that arises in short-baseline neutrino oscillation experiments and from estimates of the effective number of neutrino flavors from fits to cosmological data. In this paper, we show that the nuSTORM facility, with stored muons of 3.8 GeV/c +/- 10%, will be able to carry out a conclusive muon neutrino appearance search for sterile neutrinos and test the LSND and MiniBooNE experimental signals with 10 sigma sensitivity, even assuming conservative estimates for the systematic uncertainties. This experiment would add greatly to our knowledge of the contribution of light sterile neutrinos to the number of effective neutrino flavors from the abundance of primordial helium production and from constraints on neutrino energy density from the cosmic microwave background. The appearance search is complemented by a simultaneous muon neutrino disappearance analysis that will facilitate tests of various sterile neutrino models.
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ATLAS Collaboration(Aad, G. et al), Cabrera Urban, S., Castillo Gimenez, V., Costa, M. J., Fassi, F., Ferrer, A., et al. (2014). Light-quark and gluon jet discrimination in collisions at root s=7 TeV with the ATLAS detector. Eur. Phys. J. C, 74(8), 3023–29pp.
Abstract: A likelihood-based discriminant for the identification of quark- and gluon-initiated jets is built and validated using 4.7 fb of proton-proton collision data at collected with the ATLAS detector at the LHC. Data samples with enriched quark or gluon content are used in the construction and validation of templates of jet properties that are the input to the likelihood-based discriminant. The discriminating power of the jet tagger is established in both data and Monte Carlo samples within a systematic uncertainty of 10-20 %. In data, light-quark jets can be tagged with an efficiency of while achieving a gluon-jet mis-tag rate of in a range between and for jets in the acceptance of the tracker. The rejection of gluon-jets found in the data is significantly below what is attainable using a Pythia 6 Monte Carlo simulation, where gluon-jet mis-tag rates of 10 % can be reached for a 50 % selection efficiency of light-quark jets using the same jet properties.
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