Related papers: The `LEP paradox'
We motivate and construct supersymmetric theories with continuous flavor symmetry, under which the electroweak Higgs doublets transform non-trivially. Flavor symmetry is spontaneously broken at a large mass scale in a sector of…
In the course of seeking the microscopic mechanism of superconductivity in cuprate high temperature superconductors, the pseudogap phase\textemdash the very abnormal 'normal' state on the hole-doped side\textemdash has proven to be as big…
The discovery of a 125 GeV Higgs boson and rising lower bounds on the masses of superpartners have lead to concerns that supersymmetric models are now fine tuned. Large stop masses, required for a 125 GeV Higgs, feed into the electroweak…
The discovery of the Higgs particle at around 126 GeV has given us a big hint towards the origin of the Higgs potential. The running quartic self-coupling decreases and crosses zero somewhere in the very high energy scale. It is usually…
After a brief introduction to the theoretical basis of the Higgs mechanism for generating the masses of elementary particles, the experimental searches for Higgs particles will be summarized, from bounds at LEP to inferences for LHC. The…
We investigate naturalness in the Standard Model (SM) Higgs sector using effective field theory (EFT) techniques and find the requirements on the new heavy physics that can potentially cure the little hierarchy problem below a scale…
An update of the electroweak measurements at LEP and SLC is presented. These measurements are used to perform precise tests of the Standard Model. A constraint on the Standard Model Higgs mass is obtained when the direct measurements of…
We review the results of the Standard Model Higgs boson search at LEP. An emphasis is put on revealing the details behind the statistical procedure developed by the LEP Higgs working group. The procedure is explained using a toy model which…
The vacuum of the Standard Model is known to be unstable for the measured values of the top and Higgs masses. Here we show how vacuum stability can be achieved naturally if lepton number is violated spontaneously at the TeV scale. More…
The quadratic divergences in the scalar sector of the standard model are considered. Since the divergences are present also in the unbroken theory, a natural scale for the divergence formula is proposed to be at the scale of new physics.…
Most physicists agree that the Einstein-Podolsky-Rosen-Bell paradox exemplifies much of the strange behavior of quantum mechanics, but argument persists about what assumptions underlie the paradox. To clarify what the debate is about, we…
In the Standard Model the Fermi constant is associated with the vacuum expectation value of the Higgs field $<\Phi>$, `the condensate', usually believed to be a nearly cut-off independent quantity. General arguments related to the…
We discuss the vacuum energy density term resulting from the spontaneous breakdown of the electroweak gauge symmetry, in the Higgs Mechanism. We alternatively expand the scalar field at one of the degenerate states that lie outside the…
Low energy supersymmetry is motivated by its use as a solution to the hierarchy problem of the electroweak scale. Having motivated this model with naturalness arguments, it is then necessary to check whether the experimentally allowed…
We examine brane-world scenarios in which all the observed Standard Model particles reside on a brane but the Higgs is an elementary extra-dimensional scalar in the bulk. We show that, for codimension 2 branes, often-neglected interactions…
After a short history of the $\Lambda$-term it is explained why the (effective) cosmological constant is expected to obtain contributions from short-distance physics, corresponding to an energy at least as large as the Fermi scale. The…
In supersymmetric theories with a strong conformal sector, soft supersymmetry breaking at the TeV scale naturally gives rise to confinement and chiral symmetry breaking at the same scale. We investigate models where such a sector…
Leptogenic supersymmetry is a scenario characterized by cascade decays with copious lepton production. Leptogenic models have striking signatures that can be probed by the LHC even in the 10 TeV run with as little as 200 pb^-1 of data,…
The topologies arising from the production of supersymmetric particles at the LEP collider are briefly reviewed recalling detector requirements, simulation and other experimental issues.
Although supersymmetry has not been seen directly by experiment, there are powerful physics reasons to suspect that it should be an ingredient of nature and that superpartner masses should be somewhat near the weak scale. I present an…