No Arabic abstract
An alternative to the conventional see-saw mechanism is proposed to explain the origin of small neutrino masses in supersymmetric theories. The masses and couplings of the right-handed neutrino field are suppressed by supersymmetry breaking, in a way similar to the suppression of the Higgs doublet mass, $mu$. New mechanisms for light Majorana, Dirac and sterile neutrinos arise, depending on the degree of suppression. Superpartner phenomenology is greatly altered by the presence of weak scale right-handed sneutrinos, which may have a coupling to a Higgs boson and a left-handed sneutrino. The sneutrino spectrum and couplings are quite unlike the conventional case - the lightest sneutrino can be the dark matter and predictions are given for event rates at upcoming halo dark matter direct detection experiments. Higgs decays and search strategies are changed. Copious Higgs production at hadron colliders can result from cascade decays of squarks and gluinos.
We demonstrate that Dirac neutrino masses in the experimentally preferred range are generated within supersymmetric gauge extensions of the Standard Model with a generalized supersymmetry breaking sector. If the usual superpotential Yukawa couplings are forbidden by the additional gauge symmetry (such as a U(1)), effective Dirac mass terms involving the wrong Higgs field can arise either at tree level due to hard supersymmetry breaking fermion Yukawa couplings, or at one-loop due to nonanalytic or nonholomorphic soft supersymmetry breaking trilinear scalar couplings. As both of these operators are naturally suppressed in generic models of supersymmetry breaking, the resulting neutrino masses are naturally in the sub-eV range. The neutrino magnetic and electric dipole moments resulting from the radiative mechanism also vanish at one-loop order.
We present how a neutrino condensate and small neutrino masses emerge from a topological formulation of gravitational anomaly. We first recapitulate how a gravitational $theta$-term leads to the emergence of a new bound neutrino state analogous to the $eta$ meson of QCD. Then we show the consequent formation of a neutrino vacuum condensate, which effectively generates small neutrino masses. Afterwards we outline several phenomenological consequences of our neutrino mass generation model. The cosmological neutrino mass bound vanishes since we predict the neutrinos to be massless until the phase transition in the late Universe, $Tsim {rm meV}$. Deviations from an equal flavor rate due to enhanced neutrino decays in extraterrestrial neutrino fluxes can be observed in future IceCube data. The current cosmological neutrino background only consists of the lightest neutrinos, which, due to enhanced neutrino-neutrino interactions, either bind up, form a superfluid, or completely annihilate into massless bosons. Strongly coupled relic neutrinos could provide a contribution to cold dark matter in the late Universe, together with the new proposed particles and topological defects, which may have formed during neutrino condensation. These enhanced interactions could also be a source of relic neutrino clustering in our Galaxy, which possibly makes the overdense cosmic neutrino background detectable in the KATRIN experiment. The neutrino condensate provides a mass for the hypothetical $B-L$ gauge boson, leading to a gravity-competing force detectable in short-distance measurements. Gravitational waves detections have the potential to probe our neutrino mass generation mechanism.
Perturbative supersymmetry breaking on the landscape of string vacua is expected to favor large soft terms as a power-law or log distribution, but tempered by an anthropic veto of inappropriate vacua or vacua leading to too large a value for the derived weak scale -- a violation of the atomic principle. Indeed, scans of such vacua yield a statistical prediction for light Higgs boson mass m_h~ 125 GeV with sparticles (save possibly light higgsinos) typically beyond LHC reach. In contrast, models of dynamical SUSY breaking (DSB) -- with a hidden sector gauge coupling g^2 scanned uniformly -- lead to gaugino condensation and a uniform distribution of soft parameters on a log scale. Then soft terms are expected to be distributed as $m_{rm soft}^{-1}$ favoring small values. A scan of DSB soft terms generally leads to $m_hll 125$ GeV and sparticle masses usually below LHC limits. Thus, the DSB landscape scenario seems excluded from LHC search results. An alternative is that the exponential suppression of the weak scale is set anthropically on the landscape via the atomic principle.
We suggest and analyze a class of supersymmetric Z models based on the gauge symmetry U(1)_x = x Y - (B-L), where Y is the Standard Model hypercharge. For 1 < x < 2, the U(1)_x D-term generates positive contributions to the slepton masses, which is shown to solve the tachyonic slepton problem of anomaly mediated supersymmetry breaking (AMSB). The resulting models are very predictive, both in the SUSY breaking sector and in the Z sector. We find M_Z = (2-4) TeV and the Z-Z mixing angle xi = 0.001. Consistency with symmetry breaking and AMSB phenomenology renders the Z leptophobic, with Br(Z -> e^+ e^-) = (1-1.6)% and Br(Z -> q q-bar) = 44%. The lightest SUSY particle is either the neutral Wino or the sneutrino in these models.
We consider supersymmetric models where the scale of supersymmetry breaking lies between 5 $times 10^6$ GeV and 5 $times 10^8$ GeV. In this class of theories, which includes models of gauge mediated supersymmetry breaking, the lightest supersymmetric particle is the gravitino. The next to lightest supersymmetric particle is typically a long lived charged slepton with a lifetime between a microsecond and a second, depending on its mass. Collisions of high energy neutrinos with nucleons in the earth can result in the production of a pair of these sleptons. Their very high boost means they typically decay outside the earth. We investigate the production of these particles by the diffuse flux of high energy neutrinos, and the potential for their observation in large ice or water Cerenkov detectors. The relatively small cross-section for the production of supersymmetric particles is partially compensated for by the very long range of heavy particles. The signal in the detector consists of two parallel charged tracks emerging from the earth about 100 meters apart, with very little background. A detailed calculation using the Waxman-Bahcall limit on the neutrino flux and realistic spectra shows that km$^3$ experiments could see as many as 4 events a year. We conclude that neutrino telescopes will complement collider searches in the determination of the supersymmetry breaking scale, and may even give the first evidence for supersymmetry at the weak scale.