Showing papers on "Gauge boson published in 2017"

Subdimensional particle structure of higher rank U ( 1 ) spin liquids

Abstract: Quantum spin liquids can be well described in the language of gauge theory. While most theoretical effort has been focused on gauge theories with a familiar vector gauge field, there exists a stable class of quantum spin liquids described by higher-rank tensor gauge fields. Here, the authors focus on a class of stable three-dimensional spin liquids described by symmetric tensor $U$(1) gauge fields. They find that these spin liquids feature an exotic class of excitations that are restricted to motion along lower-dimensional subspaces, a phenomenon seen earlier in fracton models. They show how this subdimensional behavior follows naturally from a set of higher-moment charge conservation laws that place severe restrictions on particle motion. This work opens up an exciting new direction in the field of spin liquids.

Particle physics models for the 17 MeV anomaly in beryllium nuclear decays

Abstract: The $6.8\ensuremath{\sigma}$ anomaly in excited $^{8}\mathrm{Be}$ nuclear decays via internal pair creation is fit well by a new particle interpretation. In a previous analysis, we showed that a 17 MeV protophobic gauge boson provides a particle physics explanation of the anomaly consistent with all existing constraints. Here we begin with a review of the physics of internal pair creation in $^{8}\mathrm{Be}$ decays and the characteristics of the observed anomaly. To develop its particle interpretation, we provide an effective operator analysis for excited $^{8}\mathrm{Be}$ decays to particles with a variety of spins and parities and show that these considerations exclude simple models with scalar particles. We discuss the required couplings for a gauge boson to give the observed signal, highlighting the significant dependence on the precise mass of the boson and isospin mixing and breaking effects. We present anomaly-free extensions of the Standard Model that contain protophobic gauge bosons with the desired couplings to explain the $^{8}\mathrm{Be}$ anomaly. In the first model, the new force carrier is a ${\mathrm{U}(1)}_{B}$ gauge boson that kinetically mixes with the photon; in the second model, it is a $\mathrm{U}(1{)}_{B\ensuremath{-}L}$ gauge boson with a similar kinetic mixing. In both cases, the models predict relatively large charged lepton couplings $\ensuremath{\sim}0.001$ that can resolve the discrepancy in the muon anomalous magnetic moment and are amenable to many experimental probes. The models also contain vectorlike leptons at the weak scale that may be accessible to near future LHC searches.

Violent preheating in inflation with nonminimal coupling

Abstract: We study particle production at the preheating era in inflation models with nonminimal coupling ξphi(2)R and quartic potential λphi(4)/4 for several cases: real scalar inflaton, complex scalar inflaton and Abelian Higgs inflaton. We point out that the preheating proceeds much more violently than previously thought. If the inflaton is a complex scalar, the phase degree of freedom is violently produced at the first stage of preheating. If the inflaton is a Higgs field, the longitudinal gauge boson production is similarly violent. This is caused by a spike-like feature in the time dependence of the inflaton field, which may be understood as a consequence of the short time scale during which the effective potential or kinetic term changes suddenly. The produced particles typically have very high momenta k lesssim √λM(P). The production might be so strong that almost all the energy of the inflaton is carried away within one oscillation for ξ(2)λ gtrsim Script O(100). This may partly change the conventional understandings of the (p)reheating after inflation with the nonminimal coupling to gravity such as Higgs inflation. We also discuss the possibility of unitarity violation at the preheating stage.

New Constraints on Light Vectors Coupled to Anomalous Currents

Abstract: We derive new constraints on light vectors coupled to standard model (SM) fermions, when the corresponding SM current is broken by the chiral anomaly The cancellation of the anomaly by heavy fermions results, in the low-energy theory, in Wess-Zumino--type interactions between the new vector and the SM gauge bosons These interactions are determined by the requirement that the heavy sector preserves the SM gauge groups and lead to $(\mathrm{energy}/\mathrm{vector}\text{ }\mathrm{mass}{)}^{2}$ enhanced rates for processes involving the longitudinal mode of the new vector Taking the example of a vector coupled to a vector coupled to SM baryon number, $Z$ decays and flavor-changing neutral current meson decays via the new vector can occur with $(\mathrm{weak}\text{ }\mathrm{scale}/\mathrm{vector}\text{ }\mathrm{mass}{)}^{2}$ enhanced rates These processes place significantly stronger coupling bounds than others considered in the literature, over a wide range of vector masses

A global view on the Higgs self-coupling

Abstract: The Higgs self-coupling is notoriously intangible at the LHC. It was recently proposed to probe the trilinear Higgs interaction through its radiative corrections to single-Higgs processes. This approach however requires to disentangle these effects from those associated to deviations of other Higgs-couplings to fermions and gauge bosons. We show that a global fit exploiting only single-Higgs inclusive data suffers from degeneracies that prevent one from extracting robust bounds on each individual coupling. We show how the inclusion of double-Higgs production via gluon fusion, and the use of differential measure-ments in the associated single-Higgs production channels W H, ZH and ttH, can help to overcome the deficiencies of a global Higgs-couplings fit. In particular, we bound the vari-ations of the Higgs trilinear self-coupling relative to its SM value to the interval [0.1, 2.3] at 68% confidence level at the high-luminosity LHC, and we discuss the robustness of our results against various assumptions on the experimental uncertainties and the underlying new physics dynamics. We also study how to obtain a parametrically enhanced deviation of the Higgs self-couplings and we estimate how large this deviation can be in a self-consistent effective field theory framework.

Z ' -portal right-handed neutrino dark matter in the minimal U (1 ) X extended Standard Model

Abstract: We consider a concise dark matter (DM) scenario in the context of a non-exotic U(1) extension of the Standard Model (SM), where a new U(1)$_X$ gauge symmetry is introduced along with three generation of right-handed neutrinos (RHNs) and an SM gauge singlet Higgs field. The model is a generalization of the minimal gauged U(1)$_{B-L}$ (baryon number minus lepton number) extension of the SM, in which the extra U(1)$_X$ gauge symmetry is expressed as a linear combination of the SM U(1)$_Y$ and U(1)$_{B-L}$ gauge symmetries. We introduce a $Z_2$-parity and assign an odd-parity only for one RHN among all particles, so that this $Z_2$-odd RHN plays a role of DM. The so-called minimal seesaw mechanism is implemented in this model with only two $Z_2$-even RHNs. In this context, we investigate physics of the RHN DM, focusing on the case that this DM particle communicates with the SM particles through the U(1)$_X$ gauge boson ($Z^\prime$ boson). This "$Z^\prime$-portal RHN DM" scenario is controlled by only three free parameters: the U(1)$_X$ gauge coupling ($\alpha_X$), the $Z^\prime$ boson mass ($m_{Z^\prime}$), and the U(1)$_X$ charge of the SM Higgs doublet ($x_H$). We consider various phenomenological constraints to identify a phenomenologically viable parameter space. The most important constraints are the observed DM relic abundance and the latest LHC Run-2 results on the search for a narrow resonance with the di-lepton final state. We find that these are complementary with each other and narrow the allowed parameter region, leading to the lower mass bound of $m_{Z^\prime} \gtrsim 2.7$ TeV.

U(1) Wilson lattice gauge theories in digital quantum simulators

Abstract: Lattice gauge theories describe fundamental phenomena in nature, but calculating their real-time dynamics on classical computers is notoriously difficult. In a recent publication [Nature 534, 516 (2016)], we proposed and experimentally demonstrated a digital quantum simulation of the paradigmatic Schwinger model, a U(1)-Wilson lattice gauge theory describing the interplay between fermionic matter and gauge bosons. Here, we provide a detailed theoretical analysis of the performance and the potential of this protocol. Our strategy is based on analytically integrating out the gauge bosons, which preserves exact gauge invariance but results in complicated long-range interactions between the matter fields. Trapped-ion platforms are naturally suited to implementing these interactions, allowing for an efficient quantum simulation of the model, with a number of gate operations that scales polynomially with system size. Employing numerical simulations, we illustrate that relevant phenomena can be observed in larger experimental systems, using as an example the production of particle--antiparticle pairs after a quantum quench. We investigate theoretically the robustness of the scheme towards generic error sources, and show that near-future experiments can reach regimes where finite-size effects are insignificant. We also discuss the challenges in quantum simulating the continuum limit of the theory. Using our scheme, fundamental phenomena of lattice gauge theories can be probed using a broad set of experimentally accessible observables, including the entanglement entropy and the vacuum persistence amplitude.

New Relations for Gauge-Theory and Gravity Amplitudes at Loop Level.

Abstract: In this Letter, we extend the tree-level Kawai-Lewellen-Tye (KLT) and Bern-Carrasco-Johansson (BCJ) amplitude relations to loop integrands of gauge theory and gravity. By rearranging the propagators of gauge and gravity loop integrands, we propose the first manifestly gauge- and diffeomorphism-invariant formulation of their double-copy relations. The one-loop KLT formula expresses gravity integrands in terms of more basic gauge invariant building blocks for gauge-theory amplitudes, dubbed partial integrands. The latter obey a one-loop analogue of the BCJ relations, and both KLT and BCJ relations are universal to bosons and fermions in any number of spacetime dimensions and independent on the amount of supersymmetry. Also, one-loop integrands of Einstein-Yang-Mills theory are related to partial integrands of pure gauge theories.

Dual gauge field theory of quantum liquid crystals in three dimensions

Abstract: We present a self-contained review of the theory of dislocation-mediated quantum melting at zero temperature in two spatial dimensions. The theory describes the liquid-crystalline phases with spatial symmetries in between a quantum crystalline solid and an isotropic superfluid: quantum nematics and smectics. It is based on an Abelian-Higgs-type duality mapping of phonons onto gauge bosons (“stress photons”), which encode for the capacity of the crystal to propagate stresses. Dislocations and disclinations, the topological defects of the crystal, are sources for the gauge fields and the melting of the crystal can be understood as the proliferation (condensation) of these defects, giving rise to the Anderson–Higgs mechanism on the dual side. For the liquid crystal phases, the shear sector of the gauge bosons becomes massive signaling that shear rigidity is lost. After providing the necessary background knowledge, including the order parameter theory of two-dimensional quantum liquid crystals and the dual theory of stress gauge bosons in bosonic crystals, the theory of melting is developed step-by-step via the disorder theory of dislocation-mediated melting. Resting on symmetry principles, we derive the phenomenological imaginary time actions of quantum nematics and smectics and analyze the full spectrum of collective modes. The quantum nematic is a superfluid having a true rotational Goldstone mode due to rotational symmetry breaking, and the origin of this ‘deconfined’ mode is traced back to the crystalline phase. The two-dimensional quantum smectic turns out to be a dizzyingly anisotropic phase with the collective modes interpolating between the solid and nematic in a non-trivial way. We also consider electrically charged bosonic crystals and liquid crystals, and carefully analyze the electromagnetic response of the quantum liquid crystal phases. In particular, the quantum nematic is a real superconductor and shows the Meissner effect. Their special properties inherited from spatial symmetry breaking show up mostly at finite momentum, and should be accessible by momentum-sensitive spectroscopy.

Anomaly-free local horizontal symmetry and anomaly-full rare B-decays

Abstract: The largest global symmetry that can be made local in the Standard Model+3νR while being compatible with Pati-Salam unification is SU(3)H×U(1)B-L. The gauge bosons of this theory would induce flavor effects involving both quarks and leptons, and are a potential candidate to explain the recent reports of lepton universality violation in rare B-meson decays. In this paper we characterize these types of models and show how they can accommodate the data and naturally be within reach of direct searches.

Electroweak Splitting Functions and High Energy Showering

Abstract: We derive the electroweak (EW) collinear splitting functions for the Standard Model, including the massive fermions, gauge bosons and the Higgs boson. We first present the splitting functions in the limit of unbroken SU(2)L × U(1)Y and discuss their general features in the collinear and soft-collinear regimes. These are the leading contributions at a splitting scale (kT ) far above the EW scale (v). We then systematically incorporate EW symmetry breaking (EWSB), which leads to the emergence of additional “ultra-collinear” splitting phenomena and naive violations of the Goldstone-boson Equivalence Theorem. We suggest a particularly convenient choice of non-covariant gauge (dubbed “Goldstone Equivalence Gauge”) that disentangles the effects of Goldstone bosons and gauge fields in the presence of EWSB, and allows trivial book-keeping of leading power corrections in v/kT . We implement a comprehensive, practical EW showering scheme based on these splitting functions using a Sudakov evolution formalism. Novel features in the implementation include a complete accounting of ultra-collinear effects, matching between shower and decay, kinematic back-reaction corrections in multi-stage showers, and mixed-state evolution of neutral bosons (γ/Z/h) using density-matrices. We employ the EW showering formalism to study a number of important physical processes at $$ \mathcal{O} $$ (1-10 TeV) energies. They include (a) electroweak partons in the initial state as the basis for vector-boson-fusion; (b) the emergence of “weak jets” such as those initiated by transverse gauge bosons, with individual splitting probabilities as large as $$ \mathcal{O} $$ (35%); (c) EW showers initiated by top quarks, including Higgs bosons in the final state; (d) the occurrence of $$ \mathcal{O} $$ (1) interference effects within EW showers involving the neutral bosons; and (e) EW corrections to new physics processes, as illustrated by production of a heavy vector boson (W ′) and the subsequent showering of its decay products.

Multiboson interactions at the LHC

Abstract: This review covers results on the production of all possible electroweak boson pairs and 2-to-1 vector boson fusion at the CERN Large Hadron Collider (LHC) in proton-proton collisions at a center of mass energy of 7 and 8 TeV. The data were taken between 2010 and 2012. Limits on anomalous triple gauge couplings (aTGCs) then follow. In addition, data on electroweak triple gauge boson production and 2-to-2 vector boson scattering yield limits on anomalous quartic gauge boson couplings (aQGCs). The LHC hosts two general purpose experiments, ATLAS and CMS, which have both reported limits on aTGCs and aQGCs which are herein summarized. The interpretation of these limits in terms of an effective field theory is reviewed, and recommendations are made for testing other types of new physics using multi-gauge boson production.

A global view on the Higgs self-coupling

Abstract: The Higgs self-coupling is notoriously intangible at the LHC. It was recently proposed to probe the trilinear Higgs interaction through its radiative corrections to single-Higgs processes. This approach however requires to disentangle these effects from those associated to deviations of other Higgs-couplings to fermions and gauge bosons. We show that a global fit exploiting only single-Higgs inclusive data suffers from degeneracies that prevent one from extracting robust bounds on each individual coupling. We show how the inclusion of double-Higgs production via gluon fusion, and the use of differential measurements in the associated single-Higgs production channels WH, ZH and ttH, can help to overcome the deficiencies of a global Higgs-couplings fit. In particular, we bound the variations of the Higgs trilinear self-coupling relative to its SM value to the interval [0.1, 2.3] at 68% confidence level at the high-luminosity LHC, and we discuss the robustness of our results against various assumptions on the experimental uncertainties and the underlying new physics dynamics. We also study how to obtain a parametrically enhanced deviation of the Higgs self-couplings and we estimate how large this deviation can be in a self-consistent effective field theory framework.

Neutrino mixing and R K anomaly in U(1) X models: a bottom-up approach

Abstract: We identify a class of U(1) X models which can explain the R K anomaly and the neutrino mixing pattern, by using a bottom-up approach. The different X-charges of lepton generations account for the lepton universality violation required to explain R K . In addition to the three right-handed neutrinos needed for the Type-I seesaw mechanism, these minimal models only introduce an additional doublet Higgs and a singlet scalar. While the former helps in reproducing the quark mixing structure, the latter gives masses to neutrinos and the new gauge boson Z ′. Our bottom-up approach determines the X-charges of all particles using theoretical consistency and experimental constraints. We find the parameter space allowed by the constraints from neutral meson mixing, rare b → s decays and direct collider searches for Z ′. Such a Z ′ may be observable at the ongoing run of the Large Hadron Collider with a few hundred fb−1 of integrated luminosity.

NLO QCD effective field theory analysis of W+ W- production at the LHC including fermionic operators

Abstract: We study the impact of anomalous gauge boson and fermion couplings on the production of ${W}^{+}{W}^{\ensuremath{-}}$ pairs at the LHC. Helicity amplitudes are presented separately to demonstrate the sources of new physics contributions and the impact of QCD and electroweak corrections. The QCD corrections have important effects on the fits to anomalous couplings, in particular when one $W$ boson is longitudinally polarized and the other is transversely polarized. In effective field theory language, we demonstrate that the dimension-6 approximation to constraining new physics effects in ${W}^{+}{W}^{\ensuremath{-}}$ pair production fails at ${p}_{T}\ensuremath{\sim}500--1000\text{ }\text{ }\mathrm{GeV}$.

Capture and Decay of Electroweak WIMPonium

Abstract: The spectrum of Weakly-Interacting-Massive-Particle (WIMP) dark matter generically possesses bound states when the WIMP mass becomes sufficiently large relative to the mass of the electroweak gauge bosons. The presence of these bound states enhances the annihilation rate via resonances in the Sommerfeld enhancement, but they can also be produced directly with the emission of a low-energy photon. In this work we compute the rate for SU(2) triplet dark matter (the wino) to bind into WIMPonium—which is possible via single-photon emission for wino masses above 5 TeV for relative velocity v < O(10(−)(2)) —and study the subsequent decays of these bound states. We present results with applications beyond the wino case, e.g. for dark matter inhabiting a nonabelian dark sector, these include analytic capture and transition rates for general dark sectors in the limit of vanishing force carrier mass, efficient numerical routines for calculating positive and negative-energy eigenstates of a Hamiltonian containing interactions with both massive and massless force carriers, and a study of the scaling of bound state formation in the short-range Hulth&apos,{e}n potential. In the specific case of the wino, we find that the rate for bound state formation is suppressed relative to direct annihilation, and so provides only a small correction to the overall annihilation rate. The soft photons radiated by the capture process and by bound state transitions could permit measurement of the dark matter's quantum numbers, for wino-like dark matter, such photons are rare, but might be observable by a future ground-based gamma-ray telescope combining large effective area and a low energy threshold.

Novel SM-like Higgs decay into displaced heavy neutrino pairs in U(1)′ models

Abstract: We examine the observability of heavy neutrino (ν h ) signatures of a U(1)′ enlarged Standard Model (SM) encompassing three heavy Majorana neutrinos alongside the known light neutrino states at the the Large Hadron Collider (LHC). We show that heavy neutrinos can be rather long-lived particles producing distinctive displaced vertices that can be accessed in the CERN LHC detectors. We concentrate here on the gluon fusion production mechanism gg → H 1,2 → ν h ν h , where H 1 is the discovered SM-like Higgs and H 2 is a heavier state, yielding displaced leptons following ν h decays into weak gauge bosons. Using data collected by the end of the LHC Run 2, these signatures would prove to be accessible with negligibly small background.

Emergence of Supersymmetric Quantum Electrodynamics.

Abstract: Supersymmetric (SUSY) gauge theories such as the minimal supersymmetric standard model play a fundamental role in modern particle physics, but have not been verified so far in nature. Here, we show that a SUSY gauge theory with dynamical gauge bosons and fermionic gauginos emerges naturally at the pair-density-wave (PDW) quantum phase transition on the surface of a correlated topological insulator hosting three Dirac cones, such as the topological Kondo insulator SmB_{6}. At the quantum tricritical point between the surface Dirac semimetal and nematic PDW phases, three massless bosonic Cooper pair fields emerge as the superpartners of three massless surface Dirac fermions. The resulting low-energy effective theory is the supersymmetric XYZ model, which is dual by mirror symmetry to N=2 supersymmetric quantum electrodynamics in 2+1 dimensions, providing a first example of emergent supersymmetric gauge theory in condensed matter systems. Supersymmetry allows us to determine certain critical exponents and the optical conductivity of the surface states at the strongly coupled tricritical point exactly, which may be measured in future experiments.

Flavor gauge models below the Fermi scale

Abstract: The mass and weak interaction eigenstates for the quarks of the third generation are very well aligned, an empirical fact for which the Standard Model offers no explanation. We explore the possibility that this alignment is due to an additional gauge symmetry in the third generation. Specifically, we construct and analyze an explicit, renormalizable model with a gauge boson, X, corresponding to the B − L symmetry of the third family. Having a relatively light (in the MeV to multi-GeV range), flavor-nonuniversal gauge boson results in a variety of constraints from different sources. By systematically analyzing 20 different constraints, we identify the most sensitive probes: kaon, B+, D+ and Upsilon decays, $$ D-{\overline{D}}^0 $$ mixing, atomic parity violation, and neutrino scattering and oscillations. For the new gauge coupling g X in the range (10−2−10−4) the model is shown to be consistent with the data. Possible ways of testing the model in b physics, top and Z decays, direct collider production and neutrino oscillation experiments, where one can observe nonstandard matter effects, are outlined. The choice of leptons to carry the new force is ambiguous, resulting in additional phenomenological implications, such as non-universality in semileptonic bottom decays. The proposed framework provides interesting connections between neutrino oscillations, flavor and collider physics.

Time to Go Beyond Triple-Gauge-Boson-Coupling Interpretation of W Pair Production.

Abstract: $W$ boson pair production processes at ${e}^{+}{e}^{\ensuremath{-}}$ and $pp$ colliders have been conventionally interpreted as measurements of $WWZ$ and $WW\ensuremath{\gamma}$ triple gauge couplings (TGCs). Such an interpretation is based on the assumption that new physics effects other than anomalous TGCs are negligible. While this ``TGC dominance assumption'' was well motivated and useful at LEP2 thanks to precision electroweak constraints, it is already challenged by recent LHC data. In fact, contributions from anomalous $Z$ boson couplings that are allowed by electroweak precision data but neglected in LHC analyses, which are enhanced at high energy, can even dominate over those from the anomalous TGCs considered. This limits the generality of the anomalous TGC constraints derived in current analyses and necessitates extension of the analysis framework and a change of physics interpretation. The issue will persist as we continue to explore the high-energy frontier. We clarify and analyze the situation in the effective field theory framework, which provides a useful organizing principle for understanding standard model deviations in the high-energy regime.

Sterile neutrino portal to Dark Matter I: the U(1) B − L case

Abstract: In this paper we explore the possibility that the sterile neutrino and Dark Matter sectors in the Universe have a common origin. We study the consequences of this assumption in the simple case of coupling the dark sector to the Standard Model via a global U(1) B−L , broken down spontaneously by a dark scalar. This dark scalar provides masses to the dark fermions and communicates with the Higgs via a Higgs portal coupling. We find an interesting interplay between Dark Matter annihilation to dark scalars — the CP-even that mixes with the Higgs and the CP-odd which becomes a Goldstone boson, the Majoron — and heavy neutrinos, as well as collider probes via the coupling to the Higgs. Moreover, Dark Matter annihilation into sterile neutrinos and its subsequent decay to gauge bosons and quarks, charged leptons or neutrinos lead to indirect detection signatures which are close to current bounds on the gamma ray flux from the galactic center and dwarf galaxies.

Complete renormalization of QCD at five loops

Abstract: We present new analytical five-loop Feynman-gauge results for the anomalous dimensions of ghost field and -vertex, generalizing the known values for SU(3) to a general gauge group. Together with previously published results on the quark mass and -field anomalous dimensions and the Beta function, this completes the 5-loop renormalization program of gauge theories in that gauge.

On higher-spin supertranslations and superrotations

Abstract: We study the large gauge transformations of massless higher-spin fields in four-dimensional Minkowski space. Upon imposing suitable fall-off conditions, providing higher-spin counterparts of the Bondi gauge, we observe the existence of an infinite-dimensional asymptotic symmetry algebra. The corresponding Ward identities can be held responsible for Weinberg’s factorisation theorem for amplitudes involving soft particles of spin greater than two.