UC Davis Particle Physics Seminars

John Terning discusses how a SUSY model of a composite top-Higgs sector can resolved the four hierarchy problems: the gauge hierarchy, the yukawa hierarchy, the little hierarchy, and the squark mass hierarchy.

Inspired by models designed to explain the top-quark foward-backward asymmetry, Daniel Whiteson discusses studies of unexplored experimental signatures inside WWbb+jet events, which mimic the top quark signature and may be hiding inside the top quark sample. Whiteson presents the first search for top+jet resonances, the first search to use boosted hadronic W bosons, new same-sign top quark limits, new heavy quark limits, and discuss ttbar+jet resonances, as well as the possibility that Higgs cascades could be hiding inside WWbb events.

Ami Katz discusses a general model independent analysis of DM experiments.

Katherine Copic discusses ATLAS's first searches for fourth generation quarks, including a preview of new results for the winter conferences. While we search explicitly for fourth generation quarks, the final states examined are also more broadly applicable to searching for wider classes of new phenomenona.

Jared Kaplan discusses muon colliders and neutrino factories. They are aimed at achieving the highest lepton-antilepton collision energies and precision measurements of parameters of the neutrino mixing matrix. The performance and cost of these depend sensitively on how well a beam of muons can be cooled. Recent progress in muon cooling design studies and prototype tests nourish the hope that such facilities can be built during the next decade. The status of the key technologies and their various demonstration experiments will be summarized.

Jared Kaplan discusses how to derive a simple relation between the Mellin amplitude for AdS/CFT correlation functions and the bulk S-Matrix in the flat spacetime limit, proving a conjecture of Penedones. As a consequence of the Operator Product Expansion, the Mellin amplitude for any unitary CFT must be a meromorphic function with simple poles on the real axis. This provides a powerful and suggestive handle on the locality vis-a-vis analyticity properties of the S-Matrix. We begin to explore analyticity by showing how the familiar poles and branch cuts of scattering amplitudes arise from the holographic description. We use this to show how the existence of small black holes in AdS leads to a universal prediction for the conformal block decomposition of the dual CFT.

Jean-Francois Arguin discusses how ecent measurements of the top quark charge asymmetry performed at both CDF and DZero produced tantalizing deviations from the SM prediction. Given that the dataset for these analyses will not improved dramatically, decisive confirmations will be required by the LHC experiments. After reviewing the measurements performed at the Tevatron, Arguin will discuss the challenges to perform these measurements at the LHC by describing the ATLAS measurement. In particular Arguin will describe how one needs to exploit the large datasets of top quarks at the LHC to compensate for the difficulty to perform such a measurement in a symmetric proton-proton collider environment.

Csaba Csaki discusses how minimal flavor violation in supersymmetry can give a consistent phenomenology with resorting to R-party.

A generic prediction of string theory is the existence of many axion fields. It has recently been argued that many of these fields should be light and, like the well known QCD axion, lead to observable cosmological consequences. In this video, Marsh talks about in detail the effect of the so-called string axiverse on large scale structure, focusing on the morphology and evolution of density perturbations, anisotropies in the cosmic microwave background and weak gravitational lensing of distant galaxies.

Eric Zimmerman offers the experimental results from the T2K experiment on neutrino mixing.