No Arabic abstract
The successful description of current data provided by the Standard Model includes fundamental fermions that are color-singlets and electroweak-nonsinglets, but no fermions that are electroweak-singlets and color-nonsinglets. In an effort to understand the absence of such fermions, we construct and study {it gedanken} models that do contain electroweak-singlet chiral quark fields. These models exhibit several distinctive properties, including the absence of any neutral lepton and the fact that both the $(uud)$ and $(ddu)$ nucleons are electrically charged. We also explore how such models could arise as low-energy limits of grand unified theories and, in this more restrictive context, we show that they exhibit further exotic properties.
Electroweak baryogenesis is a simple and attractive candidate mechanism for generating the observed baryon asymmetry in the Universe. Its viability is sometimes investigated in terms of an effective field theory of the Standard Model involving higher dimension operators. We investigate the validity of such an effective field theory approach to the problem of identifying electroweak phase transitions strong enough for electroweak baryogenesis to be successful. We identify and discuss some pitfalls of this approach due to the modest hierarchy between mass scales of heavy degrees or freedom and the Higgs, and the possibility of dimensionful couplings violating the decoupling between light and heavy degrees of freedom.
We study a mechanism that generates the baryon asymmetry of the Universe during a tachyonic electroweak phase transition. We utilize as sole source of CP violation an operator that was recently obtained from the Standard Model by integrating out the quarks.
In the global fit of the Standard Model using Gfitter, electroweak precision observables as well as constraints from direct Higgs searches have been compared with state-of-the-art electroweak predictions. We use the most recent results for direct Higgs searches at LEP and Tevatron and the latest measurements of m_t and M_W. Example results are an estimation of the mass of the Higgs boson (M_H=116.3 +15.6 -1.3 GeV) and a forth-order result for the strong coupling constant (alpha_S(M_Z^2)=0.1193 +-0.0028(exp) +-0.0001(theo)). A fit of the oblique parameters (STU) to the electroweak data is performed, in order to constrain physics beyond the Standard Model. For instance, the parameter space of the Littlest Higgs Model with T-parity can be restricted via the oblique parameters. In addition, fit results for a model with an extended Higgs sector (2HDM) using mainly observables from the B and K physics are presented.
We briefly review the global Standard Model fit to electroweak precision data, and discuss the status of electroweak constraints on new interactions. We follow a general effective Lagrangian approach to obtain model-independent limits on the dimension-six operators, as well as on several common new physics extensions.
Constituent quark masses can be determined quite well from experimental data in several ways and one can obtain fairly accurate values for all six $m_q$. The strong quark-meson coupling $g=2pi /sqrt{3}$ arises from the quark-level linear $sigma$ model, whereas $e$ and $sintheta_w$ arise from weak interactions when the heavy $M_W$ and $M_Z$ are regarded as resonances in analogy with the strong KSFR relation. The Higgs boson mass, tied to null expectation value of charged Higgs components, is found to be around 317 GeV. Finally, the experimental CPV phase angle $delta$ and the three CKM angles $Theta_c, Theta_2, Theta_3$ are successfully deduced from the 6 constituent quark masses following Fritzschs approach.