BSM Journal Club

BSM Journal Club

Mondays, 1:00pm - 3:00pm
Newman Lab, Room 311
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The particle theory graduate student journal club ("Pheno Club") meets once a week to discuss topics of interest in phenomenology. Topics roughly alternate between review articles and new papers.

Guidelines

Fall 2009 Schedule

Topics with and (R) are review talks where some previous reading is recommended but not necessary. Otherwise topics are "current papers" and everyone is expected to have read the main paper in advance.

Fall 2009 Abstracts

• Flavor Physics BSM, Itay Nachshon (31 August 2009)
  This will be a review and continuation of Gilad Perez's lectures from TASI09. We will focus on using geometric quantities in flavor space to quantify theoretical constraints on the flavor structure of new physics. See: arXiv:0903.2118.
• Metastable SUSY Breaking, Flip Tanedo (7 Septemer 2009)
  Until 2006, finding realistic supersymmetry breaking vacua in a SUSY gauge theory was understood to be a special occurrence in finely-engineered models. The Intriligator Seiberg Shih (ISS) solution demonstrated that metastable SUSY breaking vacua, on the other hand, can be simple and generic. We will discuss sections 1-5 and (briefly) 7 of the original ISS paper, hep-th/0602239. The level of the discussion will be at that of Csaba's course last semester, suitable review can be found in hep-ph/0702069.
• Dark Matter: From Theory to Indirect Observation and Back, Bibhushan Shakya (14 September 2009)
  Even with a known theory of dark matter at hand (that is, knowing annihilation/decay channels, branching ratios, cross sections etc), deriving indirect observational effects from galactic and extragalactic sources that detectors like PAMELA and FERMI observe is nontrivial since it involves knowing how these products propagate and interact in the medium between source and observer. This talk will review the steps involved in going from the theory to what is actually seen by detectors, as well as in working backwards to use observations to distinguish between models. Reference paper: arXiv:0901.2925 (This paper is long and even I have not read all of it, but looking through it will give you a good idea of what the talk will be like).
• Little Higgs, Josh Berger (21 September 2009). In this review discussion, I will present the basics necessary to understand Little Higgs models. Beginning with brief motivation based on dimensional deconstruction, I will introduce collective symmetry breaking in general. I will move on to describe the Littlest Higgs model, with discussion its issues and their solutions, as well as its collider phenomenology if there is time. Reference: hep-ph/0512128.
• Evidence for D-Dbar mixing, David Curtin (28 September 2009). was finally been found in 2007 by the Belle and BABAR collaborations. It is a highly suppressed process in the SM and of great interest for probing BSM physics, but difficult to calculate due to hadronic contributions to the mixing amplitude. This will be a pedagogical review, covering the basic formalism, classification of CP-violating effects, calculation in the SM and experimental results and considerations. References for further reading if desired: Phys.Lett.B592: 1,2004, hep-ph/0310076.
• An instant review of instantons, Yuhsin Tsai (5 October 2009). The idea of instantons has been widely used in many different aspects of physics. Its unique property that relates the tunneling effect and the vacuum structure of the gauge theory gives interesting applications in model building, such as in QCD, SUSY and cosmology. In this discussion, we will review the connection between the tunneling and instantons. Talk about the n-vacuum and theta-vacuum in gauge theory and give classical examples like the U(1) problem and B/L-number violation. Finally, we want to review the derivation of the NSVZ beta-function in SUSY using this instanton knowledge.
• Slepton Flavor Physics: CP Violation at the TeV Scale, Josh Berger (19 Oct 2009). If low-scale supersymmetry is realized in nature, then the large number of parameters allows for large new contributions to CP violation that can be studied at the LHC and at the ILC. A particularly clean and accessible venue for studying sflavor is the slepton sector. I will first discuss the formalism for studying slepton flavor. Discussion will then proceed to constraints from SM observables and signatures of slepton CP violation at future colliders. While this topic is not strictly "cutting-edge," it is not a standard topic and my discussion will not be strictly pedagogical, so it will be helpful to have read the references. hep-ph/0111154 (primary reference), hep-ph/9603431, hep-ph/9704205.
• Kinky Kinematics? MT2 is just for you, Flip Tanedo (26 Oct 2009). I will provide an introduction to collider kinematics focusing on the MT2-type variables that extend the notion of transverse mass. For this pre-Halloween will discuss kinks and cusps and other signatures of invisible particles that go bump in the night. We will focus on the presentation by Cheng and Han, arXiv:0810.5178 and the concrete application by Cho, Choi, Kim, and Park, arXiv:0709.0288. Additional reading can be found in the references of the first work. This will be a review talk, so attendees are encouraged but not required to have read the papers beforehand.
• Gauge Invariance of the Fayet-Iliopoulos Term, David Curtin (2 Nov 2009). I will present the recent result by Seiberg and Komargodski regarding why there are no supersymmetric models whose low-energy limit can be understood in terms of D-term breaking. The proof is based on the gauge invariance of the D-term. We shall focus on the non-supergravity case. Please read the paper ahead of time to get the most out of this discussion. arXiv:0904.1159
• Composite MSSM particles from Dynamical SUSY Breaking without Messengers, Yuhsin Tsai (9 Nov 2009). An appealing approach to gauge mediation is to have the strong dynamics that breaks SUSY also produce composite MSSM particles. In this kind of single sector DSB model, SUSY is broken from baryon runaways around the confinement scale. This generates composite degrees of freedom with interesting phenomenological applications, such as small Yukawa couplings and suppression of flavor-changing neutral currents. In this talk, we will discuss the pros and cons of the model and what can be done with it. The main material for the talk is the paper hep-ph/9712389.
• Sphericity Kills Sommerfeld (Bounds on Sommerfeld Enhancement of Dark Matter Signals), Bibhushan Shakya (16 Nov 2009). Sommerfeld enhancement is currently the most likely mechanism to bridge the 3 orders of magnitude separating dark matter annihilation cross sections predicted by WIMP models and that required to explain PAMELA and FERMI observations. We will discuss the constraints on Sommerfeld enhancement from halo shape and relic density considerations, based on 0911.0422.
• Interaction from NP in the neutrino sector, Itay Nachshon (23 Nov 2009). We will study the effect that NP (at a the weak scale) has on the neutrino sector. In particular how NP interaction in the production or detection processes and neutrino oscillations combine to give a measurable effect in experiments. The paper to read is hep-ph/0105159.

2010 Winter 'Pheno Camp': 4D CFTs

This is a week-long, in-depth student workshop focusing on 4D conformal field theories in phenomenology. Meetings will be roughly 10 - 5pm every day with all participants in the same room. The dates have been fixed for 18 January - 22 January 2010, please schedule your winter break plans accordingly. We will study the 4D (super)conformal group and consider applications in supersymmetry, technicolor, AdS/CFT, renormalization group, compositeness, and as a solution to the hierarchy problem. A reading list will be posted in due course.

Resources

Unsure about places to start looking for talk ideas? Here are a few suggestions, geared towards the pedagogical side.