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Vincent, A. C., Fernandez Martinez, E., Hernandez, P., Mena, O., & Lattanzi, M. (2015). Revisiting cosmological bounds on sterile neutrinos. J. Cosmol. Astropart. Phys., 04(4), 006–23pp.
Abstract: We employ state-of-the art cosmological observables including supernova surveys and BAO information to provide constraints on the mass and mixing angle of a non-resonantly produced sterile neutrino species, showing that cosmology can effectively rule out sterile neutrinos which decay between BBN and the present day. The decoupling of an additional heavy neutrino species can modify the time dependence of the Universe's expansion between BBN and recombination and, in extreme cases, lead to an additional matter-dominated period; while this could naively lead to a younger Universe with a larger Hubble parameter, it could later be compensated by the extra radiation expected in the form of neutrinos from sterile decay. However, recombination-era observables including the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB), the shift parameter R-CMB and the sound horizon r(s) from Baryon Acoustic Oscillations (BAO) severely constrain this scenario. We self-consistently include the full time-evolution of the coupled sterile neutrino and standard model sectors in an MCMC, showing that if decay occurs after BBN, the sterile neutrino is essentially bounded by the constraint sin(2) theta less than or similar to 0.026(m(s)/eV)(-2).
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Bazeia, D., Losano, L., Menezes, R., Olmo, G. J., & Rubiera-Garcia, D. (2015). Robustness of braneworld scenarios against tensorial perturbations. Class. Quantum Gravity, 32(21), 215011–10pp.
Abstract: Inspired by the peculiarities of the effective geometry of crystalline structures, we reconsider thick brane scenarios from a metric-affine perspective. We show that for a rather general family of theories of gravity, whose Lagrangian is an arbitrary function of the metric and the Ricci tensor, the background and scalar field equations can be written in first-order form, and tensorial perturbations have a non negative definite spectrum, which makes them stable under linear perturbations regardless of the form of the gravity Lagrangian. We find, in particular, that the tensorial zero modes are exactly the same as predicted by Einstein's theory regardless of the scalar field and gravitational Lagrangians.
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Di Valentino, E., Gariazzo, S., Giusarma, E., & Mena, O. (2015). Robustness of cosmological axion mass limits. Phys. Rev. D, 91(12), 123505–12pp.
Abstract: We present the cosmological bounds on the thermal axion mass in an extended cosmological scenario in which the primordial power spectrum of scalar perturbations differs from the usual power-law shape predicted by the simplest inflationary models. The power spectrum is instead modeled by means of a “piecewise cubic Hermite interpolating polynomial” (PCHIP). When using cosmic microwave background measurements combined with other cosmological data sets, the thermal axion mass constraints are degraded only slightly. The addition of the measurements of sigma(8) and Omega(m) from the 2013 Planck cluster catalog on galaxy number counts relaxes the bounds on the thermal axion mass, mildly favoring a similar to 1 eV axion mass, regardless of the model adopted for the primordial power spectrum. However, in general, such a preference disappears if the sum of the three active neutrino masses is also considered as a free parameter in our numerical analyses, due to the strong correlation between the masses of these two hot thermal relics.
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Geng, L. S., Ren, X. L., Zhou, Y., Chen, H. X., & Oset, E. (2015). S-wave KK* interactions in a finite volume and the f(1)(1285). Phys. Rev. D, 92(1), 014029–9pp.
Abstract: Lattice QCD simulations provide a promising way to disentangle different interpretations of hadronic resonances, which might be of particular relevance to understand the nature of the so-called XYZ particles. Recent studies have shown that in addition to the well-established naive quark model picture, the axial-vector meson f(1)(1285) can also be understood as a dynamically generated state built upon the KK* interaction. In this work, we calculate the energy levels of the KK* system in the f(1)(1285) channel in finite volume using the chiral unitary approach. We propose to calculate the loop function in the dimensional regularization scheme, which is equivalent to the hybrid approach adopted in previous studies. We also study the inverse problem of extracting the bound state information from synthetic lattice QCD data and comment on the difference between our approach and the Luscher method.
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ATLAS Collaboration(Aad, G. et al), Alvarez Piqueras, D., Cabrera Urban, S., Castillo Gimenez, V., Costa, M. J., Fernandez Martinez, P., et al. (2015). Search for a Charged Higgs Boson Produced in the Vector-Boson Fusion Mode with Decay H-+/- -> W(+/-)Z using pp Collisions at root S=8 TeV with the ATLAS Experiment. Phys. Rev. Lett., 114(23), 231801–18pp.
Abstract: A search for a charged Higgs boson, H-+/-, decaying to a W-+/- boson and a Z boson is presented. The search is based on 20.3 fb(-1) of proton-proton collision data at a center-of-mass energy of 8 TeV recorded with the ATLAS detector at the LHC. The H-+/- boson is assumed to be produced via vector-boson fusion and the decays W-+/- -> q (q') over bar and Z -> e(+)e(-)/mu(+)mu(-) are considered. The search is performed in a range of charged Higgs boson masses from 200 to 1000 GeV. No evidence for the production of an H+ boson is observed. Upper limits of 31-1020 fb at 95% C.L. are placed on the cross section for vector-boson fusion production of an H-+/- boson times its branching fraction to W(+/-)Z. The limits are compared with predictions from the Georgi-Machacek Higgs triplet model.
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