No Arabic abstract
We provide non-perturbative evidence for the fact that there is no hot electroweak phase transition at large Higgs masses, $m_H = 95$, 120 and 180 GeV. This means that the line of first order phase transitions separating the symmetric and broken phases at small $m_H$ has an end point $m_{H,c}$. In the minimal standard electroweak theory 70 GeV $<m_{H,c}<$ 95 GeV and most likely $m_{H,c} approx 80$ GeV. If the electroweak theory is weakly coupled and the Higgs boson is found to be heavier than the critical value (which depends on the theory in question), cosmological remnants from the electroweak epoch are improbable.
We study the correlation between the value of the triple Higgs coupling and the nature of the electroweak phase transition. We use an effective potential approach, including higher order, non-renormalizable terms coming from integrating out new physics. We show that if only the dimension six operators are considered, large positive deviations of the triple Higgs coupling from its Standard Model (SM) value are predicted in the regions of parameter space consistent with a strong first order electroweak phase transition (SFOEPT). We also show that at higher orders sizable and negative deviations of the triple Higgs coupling may be obtained, and the sign of the corrections tends to be correlated with the order of the phase transition. We also consider a singlet extension of the SM, which allows us to establish the connection with the effective field theory (EFT) approach and analyze the limits of its validity. Furthermore, we study how to probe the triple Higgs coupling from the double Higgs production at the LHC. We show that selective cuts in the invariant mass of the two Higgs bosons should be used, to maximize the sensitivity for values of the triple Higgs coupling significantly different from the Standard Model one.
We present possible indications for flavor separation during the QCD crossover transition based on continuum extrapolated lattice QCD calculations of higher order susceptibilities. We base our findings on flavor specific quantities in the light and strange quark sector. We propose a possible experimental verification of our prediction, based on the measurement of higher order moments of identified particle multiplicities. Since all our calculations are performed at zero baryochemical potential, these results are of particular relevance for the heavy ion program at the LHC.
A four generation supersymmetric model is proposed, in which the Tevatron ``top-quark events are reinterpreted as the production of $t^prime$ which decays dominantly to $bW^+$. In this model, $m_tsimeq m_W$, and $trtawidetilde twidetildechi^0_1$, with $widetilde trta cwidetildechi^0_1$. This decay chain, which rarely produces a hard isolated lepton, would have been missed in all previous top quark searches. A narrow region of the model parameter space exists which cannot yet be ruled out by present data. This model predicts a rich spectrum of new physics which can be probed at LEP-II and the Tevatron.
The confinement-deconfinement transition is discussed from topological viewpoints. The topological change of the system is achieved by introducing the dimensionless imaginary chemical potential ($theta$). Then, the non-trivial free-energy degeneracy becomes the signal of the deconfinement transition and it can be visualized by using the map of the thermodynamic quantities to the circle $S^1$ along $theta$. To understand this topological deconfinement transition at finite real quark chemical potential ($mu_mathrm{R}$), we consider the isospin chemical potential ($mu_mathrm{iso}$) in the effective model of QCD. The phase diagram at finite $mu_mathrm{iso}$ is identical with that at finite $mu_mathrm{R}$ outside of the pion-condensed phase at least in the large-$N_mathrm{c}$ limit via the well-known orbifold equivalence. In the present effective model, the topological deconfinement transition does not show a significant dependence on $mu_mathrm{iso}$ and then we can expect that this tendency also appears at small $mu_mathrm{R}$. Also, the chiral transition and the topological deconfinement transition seems to be weakly correlated. If we will access lattice QCD data for the temperature dependence of the quark number density at finite $mu_mathrm{iso}$ with $theta=pi/3$, our surmise can be judged.
We study the finite temperature electroweak phase transition in an external hypercharge U(1) magnetic field H_Y, using lattice Monte Carlo simulations. For sufficiently small fields, H_Y/T^2 < 0.3, the magnetic field makes the first order transition stronger, but it still turns into a crossover for Higgs masses m_H ~ 80 GeV. For larger fields, we observe a mixed phase analogous to a type I superconductor, where a single macroscopic tube of the symmetric phase, parallel to H_Y, penetrates through the broken phase. For the magnetic fields and Higgs masses studied, we did not see indications of the expected Ambjorn-Olesen phase, which should be similar to a type II superconductor.