The kind of supersymmetry that can be discovered at the LHC must be very much flavor-blind, which used to require very special intelligently designed models of supersymmetry breaking. This led to the pessimism for some in the community that it is not likely for the LHC to discover supersymmetry. I point out that this is not so, because a garden-variety supersymmetric theories actually can do this job.
A recent cosmological bound on the gravitino mass, $m_{3/2}<4.7$ eV, together with LHC results on the Higgs mass and direct searches, excludes minimal gauge mediation with high reheating temperatures. We discuss a minimal, vector-mediated model which incorporates the seesaw mechanism for neutrino masses, allows for thermal leptogenesis, ameliorates the $mu$ problem, and achieves the observed Higgs mass and a gravitino as light as $1$-$2$ eV.
Recently, extra dimensional SUSY GUT models have been proposed in which compactification of the extra dimension(s) leads to a breakdown of the gauge symmetry and/or supersymmetry. We examine a particular class of higher-dimensional models exhibiting supersymmetry and SU(5) or SO(10) GUT symmetry. SUSY breaking occurs on a hidden brane, and is communicated to the visible brane via gaugino mediation. Non-universal gaugino masses are developed at the compactification scale as a consequence of a restricted gauge symmetry on the hidden brane. In this case, the compactification scale is at or slightly below the GUT scale. We examine the parameter space of such models where gaugino masses are related due to a Pati-Salam symmetry on the hidden brane. We find limited but significant regions of model parameter space where a viable spectra of SUSY matter is generated. Our results are extended to the more general case of three independent gaugino masses; here we find that large parameter space regions open up for large values of the U(1) gaugino mass M_1. We also find the relic density of neutralinos for these models to be generally below expectations from cosmological observations, thus leaving room for hidden sector states to make up the bulk of cold dark matter. Finally, we evaluate the branching fraction BF(b -> s gamma) and muon anomalous magnetic moment a_mu.
We develop taggers for multi-pronged jets that are simple functions of jet substructure (so-called `subjettiness) variables. These taggers can be approximately decorrelated from the jet mass in a quite simple way. Specifically, we use a Logistic Regression Design (LoRD) which, even being one of the simplest machine learning classifiers, shows a performance which surpasses that of simple variables used by the ATLAS and CMS Collaborations and is not far from more complex models based on neural networks. Contrary to the latter, our method allows for an easy implementation of tagging tasks by providing a simple and interpretable analytical formula with already optimised parameters.
We use a modified version of the Peak Patch excursion set formalism to compute the mass and size distribution of QCD axion miniclusters from a fully non-Gaussian initial density field obtained from numerical simulations of axion string decay. We find strong agreement with N-Body simulations at a significantly lower computational cost. We employ a spherical collapse model and provide fitting functions for the modified barrier in the radiation era. The halo mass function at $z=629$ has a power-law distribution $M^{-0.6}$ for masses within the range $10^{-15}lesssim Mlesssim 10^{-10}M_{odot}$, with all masses scaling as $(m_a/50mumathrm{eV})^{-0.5}$. We construct merger trees to estimate the collapse redshift and concentration mass relation, $C(M)$, which is well described using analytical results from the initial power spectrum and linear growth. Using the calibrated analytic results to extrapolate to $z=0$, our method predicts a mean concentration $Csim mathcal{O}(text{few})times10^4$. The low computational cost of our method makes future investigation of the statistics of rare, dense miniclusters easy to achieve.
Visual imitation learning provides a framework for learning complex manipulation behaviors by leveraging human demonstrations. However, current interfaces for imitation such as kinesthetic teaching or teleoperation prohibitively restrict our ability to efficiently collect large-scale data in the wild. Obtaining such diverse demonstration data is paramount for the generalization of learned skills to novel scenarios. In this work, we present an alternate interface for imitation that simplifies the data collection process while allowing for easy transfer to robots. We use commercially available reacher-grabber assistive tools both as a data collection device and as the robots end-effector. To extract action information from these visual demonstrations, we use off-the-shelf Structure from Motion (SfM) techniques in addition to training a finger detection network. We experimentally evaluate on two challenging tasks: non-prehensile pushing and prehensile stacking, with 1000 diverse demonstrations for each task. For both tasks, we use standard behavior cloning to learn executable policies from the previously collected offline demonstrations. To improve learning performance, we employ a variety of data augmentations and provide an extensive analysis of its effects. Finally, we demonstrate the utility of our interface by evaluating on real robotic scenarios with previously unseen objects and achieve a 87% success rate on pushing and a 62% success rate on stacking. Robot videos are available at https://dhiraj100892.github.io/Visual-Imitation-Made-Easy.