English

Cosmic ray air showers from sphalerons

High Energy Physics - Phenomenology 2016-09-21 v1

Abstract

The discovery of the Higgs boson marks a key ingredient to establish the electroweak structure of the Standard Model. Its non-abelian gauge structure gives rise to, yet unobserved, non-perturbative baryon and lepton number violating processes. We propose to use cosmic ray air showers, as measured at the Pierre Auger Observatory, to set a limit on the hadronic production cross section of sphalerons. We identify several observables to discriminate between sphaleron and QCD induced air showers.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1602.00647,
  title  = {Cosmic ray air showers from sphalerons},
  author = {Gustaaf Brooijmans and Peter Schichtel and Michael Spannowsky},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1602.00647},
  year   = {2016}
}

Comments

6 pages, 7 figures

R2 v1 2026-06-22T12:41:17.170Z