Related papers: Gauge coupling jump and small instantons from a la…
The apparent unification of gauge couplings around 10^16 GeV is one of the strong arguments in favor of Supersymmetric extensions of the Standard Model (SM). In this contribution two new analyses of the gauge coupling running, the latter…
We study the scalar-tensor-tensor non-Gaussian signal in an inflationary model comprising also an axion coupled with SU(2) gauge fields. In this set-up, metric fluctuations are sourced by the gauge fields already at the linear level…
We study the axion field range and low energy couplings in models with St\"uckelberg mixing between axions and $U(1)$ gauge bosons. It is noted that the gauge-invariant axion combination $\xi$ in the model is periodic $modulo$ an…
We present a new mechanism to relax the initial misalignment angle of the QCD axion and raise the cosmological bound on the axion decay constant. The QCD axion receives a contribution from small UV instantons during inflation, which raises…
The gauge coupling unification can be achieved at a unification scale around 5 x 10^{13} GeV if the Standard Model scalar sector is extended with extra Higgs-like doublets. The relevant new scalar degrees of freedom in the form of chiral Z*…
The local gauge coupling through the recipe $\partial_\mu \psi \to \partial_\mu \psi + iqA_\mu \psi$, that works so well with Dirac spinors in QED and in the gauge theories of the Standard Model, has a peculiarity when applied to scalar…
A generic non-minimal coupling can push any higher-order terms of the scalar potential sufficiently far out in field space to yield observationally viable plateau inflation. We provide analytic and numerical evidence that this generically…
We analyze the Higgs sector in the Next-to-Minimal Supersymmetric Standard Model, emphasizing the possibility of a light CP-odd scalar (axion) in the spectrum. We compute the coupling of the Standard-Model-like Higgs boson to a pair of…
In a recent paper on SU(16) grand unification, because of the presence of intermediate-energy gauge groups containing products of U(1) factors which are not orthogonal among themselves, the renormalization-group treatment has a few small…
We study $\epsilon'/\epsilon$ in the Standard Model and $\epsilon'/\epsilon$ due to anomalous $WW\gamma$ and $WWZ$ interactions %using recent result on the top quark mass from CDF. as a function of the top quark mass. In the Standard Model,…
We show that time dependent couplings may lead to nontrivial scaling properties of the surface fluctuations of the asymptotic regime in non-equilibrium kinetic roughening models . Three typical situations are studied. In the case of a…
We consider modified theories of gravity with a direct coupling between matter and geometry, denoted by an arbitrary function in terms of the Ricci scalar. Due to such a coupling, the matter stress tensor is no longer conserved and there is…
We study axion effective field theories (EFTs), with a focus on axion couplings to massive chiral gauge fields. We investigate the EFT interactions that participate in processes with an axion and two gauge bosons, and we show that, when…
We consider the quantum effects of matter fields in scalar-tensor theories and clarify the role of trace anomaly when switching between conformally related `frames'. We exploit the property that the couplings between the scalar and the…
We present a simple supersymmetric axion model that can naturally explain the origin of the Higgs mu and Bmu terms in gauge mediation while solving the strong CP problem. To stabilize the Peccei-Quinn scale, we consider mixing between the…
We propose and study at large N a new lattice gauge model , in which the Yang-Mills interaction is induced by the heavy scalar field in adjoint representation. At any dimension of space and any $ N $ the gauge fields can be integrated out…
It has been proposed recently the existence of a non-minimal coupling between a canonical scalar field (quintessence) and gravity in the framework of teleparallel gravity, motivated by similar constructions in the context of General…
Unparticles charged under a gauge group can contribute to the running of the gauge coupling. We show that a scalar unparticle of scaling dimension d contributes to the \beta function a term that is (2-d) times that from a scalar particle in…
We discuss a possibility of restricting parameters in $\mathcal{N}=2$ supergravity based on axion observations. We derive conditions that prepotential and gauge couplings should satisfy. Such conditions not only allow us to constrain the…
We investigate inflation driven by the Higgs boson in the Palatini formulation of General Relativity. Our analysis primarily focuses on a small non-minimal coupling of the Higgs field to gravity in the range $0<\xi\lesssim 1$. We…