118513003
Exotic top partners and Little Higgs
A bstractLittle Higgs models often give rise to top partners beyond the minimal ones necessary for the cancellation of quadratic divergences. We review how this occurs and discuss the phenomenology of these exotic states. We emphasize the possible importance of new pseudo-Nambu-Goldstone bosons in top partner decays. Indeed, cascade decays of exotic top partners may be the best way to discover these new bosons. We illustrate these points with a new Little Higgs construction based on an SO(10)/SO(5)2 coset structure, which fills a gap in the model building literature. These observations motivate new search strategies for top partners at the LHC, including for final states with b-jets and a large multiplicity of electroweak bosons.
15707893
Strategies to identify boosted tops
We study techniques for identifying highly boosted top jets, where the subsequent top decay products are not isolated. For hadronic boosted tops, we consider variables which probe the jet substructure in order to reduce the background from QCD jets with large invariant mass. Substructure variables related to two-body kinematics are least sensitive to the modeling of parton shower, while those which involve multi-body kinematics may still have discrimination power. For leptonic boosted tops, we consider variables which characterize the separation between the lepton—although not isolated by conventional criterion—and the hadronic activity in the top jet. Such variables are useful in reducing the backgrounds both from heavy-flavor jets and from accidental jet-lepton overlap. We give numerical estimates of the top identification efficiency versus background rejection rate as a functions of cuts on these variables, and find that these variables offer additional useful information above invariant mass alone.
119243170
Hadron Mass Effects in Power Corrections to Event Shapes
We study the effect of hadron masses on the leading power correction of dijet event-shape distributions. We define the transverse velocity operator, that describes the effects of hadron masses. It depends on the "transverse velocity" r, which is different from one only for non-vanishing hadron masses. We find that hadron-mass effects in general break universality. However we provide a simple method to identify universality classes of event shapes with a common power correction. We also compute the anomalous dimension of the power correction and the structure of the corresponding Wilson coefficient, finding a nontrivial result.
14189365
Supergravity computations without gravity complications
The conformal compensator formalism is a convenient and versatile representation of supergravity (SUGRA) obtained by gauge-fixing conformal SUGRA. Unfortunately, practical calculations often require cumbersome manipulations of component field terms involving the full gravity multiplet. In this paper, we derive an alternative gauge fixing for conformal SUGRA which decouples these gravity complications from SUGRA computations. This yields a simplified tree-level action for the matter fields in SUGRA which can be expressed compactly in terms of superfields and a modified conformal compensator. Phenomenologically relevant quantities such as the scalar potential and fermion mass matrix are then straightforwardly obtained by expanding the action in superspace.
118951198
Neutrino constraints on spontaneous Lorentz violation
We study the effect of spontaneous Lorentz violation on neutrinos. We consider two kinds of effects: static effects, where the neutrino acquires a Lorentz-violating dispersion relation, and dynamic effects, which arise from the interactions of the neutrino with the Goldstone boson of spontaneous Lorentz violation. Static effects are well detailed in the literature. Here, special emphasis is given to the novel dynamic effect of Goldstone-Cerenkov radiation, where neutrinos moving with respect to a preferred rest frame can spontaneously emit Goldstone bosons. We calculate the observable consequences of this process and use them to derive experimental bounds from SN1987A and the CMBR. The bounds derived from dynamic effects are complementary to - and in many cases much stronger than - those obtained from static effects.
7293408
Semi-annihilation of dark matter
We show that the thermal relic abundance of dark matter can be affected by a new type of reaction: semi-annihilation. Semi-annihilation takes the schematic form ψiψj → ψkφ, where ψi are stable dark matter particles and φ is an unstable state. Such reactions are generically present when dark matter is composed of more than one species with “flavor” and/or “baryon” symmetries. We give a complete set of coupled Boltzmann equations in the presence of semi-annihilations, and study two toy models featuring this process. Semi-annihilation leads to non-trivial dark matter dynamics in the early universe, often dominating over ordinary annihilation in determining the relic abundance. This process also has important implications for indirect detection experiments, by enriching the final state spectrum from dark matter (semi-)annihilation in the Milky Way.
117292627
Measurement of the charge asymmetry in the decay eta ---> pi+ pi- pi0
122591307
The Dark Energy Camera
I describe the camera (DECam) that we are building in order to perform the Dark Energy Survey on the Blanco telescope at Cerro Tololo (CTIO). The DES science goals are described in John Peoples’ talk. DECam will also be available to the astronomy community as a CTIO facility instrument.
120057201
Testing the Dark Energy Camera on a telescope simulator
The Dark Energy Camera is a new prime-focus instrument to be delivered to the Blanco 4-meter telescope at the Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory (CTIO) in 2011. Construction is in-progress at this time at Fermilab. In order to verify that the camera meets technical specifications for the Dark Energy Survey and to reduce the time required to commission the instrument while it is on the telescope, we are constructing a "Telescope Simulator" and performing full system testing prior to shipping to CTIO. This presentation will describe the Telescope Simulator and how we use it to verify some of the technical specifications.
10716932
A new approach to track finding and fitting in vector drift chambers
Abstract We describe the algorithm that is used to find and fit charged particle trajectories in the Mark III detector at SPEAR. The computer program uses a novel non-numerical pattern recognition technique analogous to that used by the digital hardware in the experiment's track finding trigger processor. The technique is both fast and efficient. The complete reconstruction of events is performed at a rate of 37 ms per track on an IBM 3081K, compared with 91 ms per track with a more conventional technique. A preliminary fit of all tracks, suitable for online monitoring, is available after 15 ms per track. Similar techniques are also applicable to future experiments operating in high multiplicity environments. The organization of the algorithms is such as to lead to simple implementation on vector processors.
116478167
Study of dalitz-plot distributions of the decays eta ---> pi+ pi- pi0 and eta ---> pi+ pi- gamma