We present our work on reconstructing sparticle masses in purely hadronic decay chains, using the $k_T$ jet-algorithm on Monte Carlo simulated events at LHC energies.
Most sparticle decay cascades envisaged at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) involve hadronic decays of intermediate particles. We use state-of-the art techniques based on the kt jet algorithm to reconstruct the resulting hadronic final states for simulated LHC events in a number of benchmark supersymmetric scenarios. In particular, we show that a general method of selecting preferentially boosted massive particles such as W, Z or Higgs bosons decaying to jets, using sub-jets found by the kt algorithm, suppresses QCD backgrounds and thereby enhances the observability of signals that would otherwise be indistinct. Consequently, measurements of the supersymmetric mass spectrum at the per-cent level can be obtained from cascades including the hadronic decays of such massive intermediate bosons.
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 propose a non-perturbative calculation scheme which is based on the semi-classical approximation of QCD and can be used to evaluate quantities of interest in hadronic physics. As a first application, we evaluate the mass of the pion and of the nucleon. Such masses are related to a particular combination of Green functions which, in some limit, is dominated by the contribution of emph{very small-sized} instantons. The size distribution of these pseudo-particles is determined by the t Hooft tunneling amplitude formula and therefore our calculation is free from any model parameters. We prove that instanton forces generate a light pion and a nucleon with realistic mass ($M_n sim 970 MeV$). In connection with sum-rules approaches, we discuss the overlap of instantons with pion and nucleon resonances.
While it is often stated that the notion of electroweak (EW) naturalness in supersymmetric models is subjective, fuzzy and model-dependent, here we argue the contrary: electroweak naturalness can be elevated to a {it principle} which is both objective and predictive. We demonstrate visually when too much fine-tuning sets in at the electroweak scale which corresponds numerically to the measure Delta_{BG}~Delta_{EW}> 30. While many constrained SUSY models are already excluded by this value, we derive updated upper bounds on sparticle masses within the two-extra parameter non-universal Higgs model (NUHM2). We confirm the classic Barbieri-Giudice (BG) result that Delta_{BG}<30 implies mu <350 GeV. However, by combining dependent soft terms which appear as multiples of m_{3/2} in supergravity models, then we obtain m(gluino)< 4 TeV as opposed to the BG result that m(gluino)<350 GeV. We compare the NUHM2 results to a similar scan in the pMSSM with 19 weak scale parameters. In the pMSSM with complete one-loop scalar potential plus dominant two-loop terms, then a m(gluino)<7 TeV bound is found. Our tabulation of upper bounds provides a target for experimenters seeking to discover or else falsify the existence of weak scale supersymmetry. In an Appendix, we show contributions to the naturalness measure from one-loop contributions to the weak scale scalar potential.
We study the radiative (E1 and M1) decays of P-wave quarkonia in a strong magnetic field based on the Lagrangian of potential nonrelativistic QCD. To investigate their properties, we implement a polarized wave function basis justified in the Paschen-Back limit. In a magnetic field stronger than the spin-orbit coupling, the wave functions of the P-wave quarkonia are drastically deformed by the Hadronic Paschen-Back effect. Such deformation leads to the anisotropy of the direction of decays from the P-wave quarkonia. The analytic formulas for the radiative decay widths in the nonrelativistic limit are shown, and the qualitative decay properties are discussed.