Related papers: The heterotic string yields natural supersymmetry
Supersymmetry and Compositeness are two prevalent paradigms providing both a solution to the hierarchy problem and a motivation for a light Higgs boson state. As the latter has now been found, its dynamics can hold the key to disentangle…
Recent LHC searches have provided strong evidence for the Higgs, a boson whose gauge quantum numbers coincide with those of a SM fermion, the neutrino. This raises the mandatory question of whether Higgs and neutrino can be related by…
In the Minimal Supersymmetric Standard Model, the higgsinos can have masses around the electroweak scale, while the other supersymmetric particles have TeV-scale masses. This happens in models of gauge-mediated SUSY breaking with a high…
New models have recently been proposed in which a second Higgs doublet couples only to the lepton doublets and right-handed neutrinos, yielding Dirac neutrino masses. The vacuum value of this second "nu-Higgs" doublet is made very small by…
We present a scenario wherein the anomalous U(1) D-term of string origin triggers supersymmetry breaking and generates naturally a Split Supersymmetry spectrum. When the gaugino and the Higgsino masses (which are of the same order of…
We desribe in detail a Z_6 orbifold compactification of the heterotic E_8 x E_8 string which leads to the (supersymmetric) standard model gauge group and matter content. The quarks and leptons appear as three 16-plets of SO(10), two of…
The discovery of the Higgs boson at the LHC supports the hypothesis that the Standard Model provides an effective parameterisation of all subatomic experimental data up to the Planck scale. String theory, which provides a viable…
A solution of the vortex type is given in a six-dimensional $SU(2)\times U(1)$ pure gauge theory coupled to Einstein gravity in a compactified background geometry. We construct the solution of an effective abelian Higgs model in terms of…
If low-energy supersymmetry is realized in nature, a seemingly contrived hierarchy in the squark mass spectrum appears to be required. We show that composite supersymmetric theories at the bottom of the conformal window can automatically…
A supersymmetric model with gauge symmetry G_1 X G_2, where G_i=SU(3)_i X SU(2)_i X U(1)_i, is constructed within the framework of gauge mediated supersymmetry breaking. At the energy scale (10-100) TeV where the gauge symmetry breaks down…
We present superconducting vortex solutions in the two-Higgs doublet model which has a gauged $U(1)$ Higgs-family symmetry. We write down an ansatz for the solution and study its basic properties, for the case of both global and gauged…
In the Standard Model, the difference between the baryon number $B$ and the lepton number $L$ is conserved, which represents a symmetry that is global and exact, and therefore unnatural. We turn it into a naturally exact, local symmetry by…
The cosmological constant problem is a failure of naturalness and suggests that a fine-tuning mechanism is at work, which may also address the hierarchy problem. An example -- supported by Weinberg's successful prediction of the…
I consider models with non-universal gaugino masses at the gauge coupling unification scale, taking into account the Higgs boson discovery. Viable regions of parameter space are mapped and studied in the case of non-universality following…
There is hope that the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN will tell us about the fate of supersymmetry at the TeVscale. Therefore we might try to identify our expectations for the discovery of SUSY, especially in the first years of…
Composite Higgs models provide an attractive solution to the hierarchy problem. However, many realistic models suffer from tuning problems in the Higgs potential. There are often large contributions from the UV dynamics of the composite…
The possibility to achieve unification at the string scale in the context of the simplest supersymmetric grand unified theory is investigated. We find conservative upper bounds on the superpartner masses consistent with the unification of…
We address the mu-problem in the context of General Gauge Mediation (GGM). We classify possible models depending on the way the Higgs fields couple to the supersymmetry breaking hidden-sector. The different types of models have distinct…
I discuss the construction of realistic superstring standard--like models in the four dimensional free fermionic formulation. I discuss the massless spectrum of the superstring standard--like models and the texture of fermion mass matrices.…
We study some conditions for the hierarchy $m_{3/2} << M_P$ to occur naturally in a generic effective supergravity theory. Absence of fine-tuning and perturbative calculability require that the effective potential has a sliding gravitino…