We study experimental and cosmological constraints on the extension of the Standard Model by three right handed neutrinos with masses between those of the pion and W boson. We combine for the first time direct, indirect and cosmological constraints in this mass range. This includes experimental constraints from neutrino oscillation data, neutrinoless double $β$ decay, electroweak precision data, lepton universality, searches for rare lepton decays, tests of CKM unitarity and past direct searches at colliders or fixed target experiments. On the cosmological side, big bang nucleosynthesis has the most pronounced impact. Our results can be used to evaluate the discovery potential of searches for heavy neutrinos at LHCb, BELLE II, SHiP, ATLAS, CMS or a future lepton collider.
The chiral and heavy quark symmetries of QCD are reviewed. These symmetries are used to predict some low-momentum properties of hadrons containing a single heavy quark. (Lectures given at the CCAST Symposium on Particle Physics at the Fermi Scale May27-June4,1993)
No Hiding in the Dark: Cosmological Bounds on Heavy Neutral Leptons with Dark Decay Channels
Washington University（华盛顿大学）；Johannes Gutenberg-Universität Mainz（美因茨约翰内斯古腾堡大学）；Institute of High Energy Physics, Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院高能物理研究所）；Kaiping Neutrino Research Center（开平中微子研究中心）
Assuming that the chiral symmetry of the light degrees of freedom is realized as the vector symmetry proposed by Georgi, we write down a chiral Lagrangian for heavy mesons which incorporates both heavy quark and vector symmetry. Some of the phenomenological implications of this idea are considered.
A massive particle decaying into neutrinos in the early Universe is known to be less constrained than if it was decaying into other standard model particles. However, even if the decay proceeds into neutrinos, the latter still inevitably emit secondary particles undergoing electromagnetic interactions that can be probed. We analyse in details how sensitive various cosmological probes are to such secondary particles, namely CMB anisotropies, CMB spectral distortions, and Big Bang Nucleosynthesis. For relics whose lifetime is shorter than the age of the Universe, this leads to original and strin…
Cosmological baryon asymmetry B is studied in supersymmetric standard models, assuming the electroweak reprocessing of B and L. Only when the soft supersymmetry breaking is taken into account, B is proportional to the primordial B-L in the supersymmetric standard models. The ratio $B/(B-L)$ is found to be about one percent less than the nonsupersymmetric case. Even if the primordial B-L vanishes, scalar-leptons can be more efficient than leptons to generate B provided that mixing angles $þ$ among scalar leptons satisfy $|þ| < 10^{-8} (T/{GeV})^{1/2}$.
Primordial non-Gaussianity signatures of extremely heavy particles are re-examined within a simple alternative to the standard inflationary paradigm, in which the primordial fluctuations and the inflationary spacetime expansion are sourced by two different fields. The curvaton scenario provides an example of this in which the distinct roles are played by the curvaton and the inflaton fields, respectively. We study couplings of the curvaton to heavy particles with masses of order the inflationary Hubble scale, and show that they can lead to non-Gaussian signals orders of magnitude larger than t…
The cosmological moduli problem for relatively heavy moduli fields is reinvestigated. For this purpose we examine the decay of a modulus field at a quantitative level. The modulus dominantly decays into gauge bosons and gauginos, provided that the couplings among them are not suppressed in the gauge kinetic function. Remarkably the modulus decay into a gravitino pair is unsuppressed generically, with a typical branching ratio of order 0.01. Such a large gravitino yield after the modulus decay causes cosmological difficulties. The constraint from the big-bang nucleosynthesis pushes up the gravi…
Constraints on the lifetime of the heavy sterile neutrino, that was proposed as a possible interpretation of the KARMEN anomaly, are derived from primordial nucleosynthesis and SN 1987A. Together with the recent experimental bounds on the nu_s lifetime, SN 1987A completely excludes this interpretation. Nucleosynthesis arguments permit a narrow window for the lifetime in the interval 0.1-0.2 sec. If nu_s possesses an anomalous interaction with nucleons, the SN bounds may not apply, while the nucleosynthesis ones would remain valid.
We consider heavy sterile neutrinos $ν_s$, with mass in the range 10 MeV $\lesssim m_s \lesssim m_π \sim 135$ MeV, thermally produced in the early universe and freezing out after the QCD phase transition. The existence of these neutrinos may alter the value of the effective number of neutrino species $N_{\rm eff}$, measured by the cosmic microwave background (CMB), and the ${}^4$He production during the BBN. We provide a detailed account of the solution of the relevant Boltzmann equations and we identify the parameter space constrained by current Planck satellite data and forecast the paramete…
We propose a mechanism of elementary thermal dark matter with mass up to $10^{14}$ GeV, within a standard cosmological history, whose relic abundance is determined solely by its interactions with the Standard Model, without violating the perturbative unitarity bound. The dark matter consists of many nearly degenerate particles which scatter with the Standard Model bath in a nearest-neighbor chain, and maintain chemical equilibrium with the Standard Model bath by in-equilibrium decays and inverse decays. The phenomenology includes super heavy elementary dark matter and heavy relics that decay a…
Heavy particles with masses much bigger than the inflationary Hubble scale $H_*$, can get non-adiabatically pair produced during inflation through their couplings to the inflaton. If such couplings give rise to time-dependent masses for the heavy particles, then following their production, the heavy particles modify the curvature perturbation around their locations in a time-dependent and scale non-invariant manner. This results into a non-trivial spatial profile of the curvature perturbation that is preserved on superhorizon scales and eventually generates localized hot or cold spots on the C…
Heavy-ion colliders have revealed the process of "fast thermalization". This experimental breakthrough has led to new theoretical tools to study the thermalization process at both weak and strong coupling. We apply this to the reheating epoch of inflationary cosmology, and the formation of a cosmological quark gluon plasma (QGP). We compute the thermalization time of the QGP at reheating, and find it is determined by the energy scale of inflation and the shear viscosity to entropy ratio $η/s$; or equivalently, the tensor-to-scalar ratio and the strong coupling constant at the epoch of thermali…
Primordial black-hole formation and heavy r-process element synthesis from the cosmological QCD transition. Two aspects of an inhomogeneous early Universe
TU Dresden（德累斯顿工业大学）；Deutsches Zentrum für Astrophysik (DZA)（德国天体物理中心）；DESY（德国电子同步辐射研究所）；Helmholtz-Zentrum Dresden-Rossendorf (HZDR)（德累斯顿-罗斯多夫亥姆霍兹中心）；Center for Advanced Systems Understanding (CASUS)（先进系统理解中心）；University of Wrocław（弗罗茨瓦夫大学）；University of Rostock（罗斯托克大学）
A colored heavy particle with sufficiently small width may form non-relativistic bound states when they are produced at the large hadron collider\,(LHC), and they can annihilate into a diphoton final state. The invariant mass of the diphoton would be around twice of the colored particle mass. In this paper, we study if such bound state can be responsible for the 750 GeV diphoton excess reported by ATLAS and CMS. We found that the best-fit signal cross section is obtained for the SU(2)$_L$ singlet colored fermion $X$ with $Y_X=4/3$. Having such an exotic hypercharge, the particle is expected to…
The recent observations of gravitational-wave and electromagnetic emission produced by the merger of the binary neutron-star system GW170817 have opened the possibility of using standard sirens to constrain the value of the Hubble constant. While the reported bound of $H_0=70_{-8}^{+12}$ at $68 \%$ C.L. is significantly weaker than those recently derived by observations of Cepheid variables, it does not require any form of cosmic distance ladder and can be considered as complementary and, in principle, more conservative. Here we combine, for the first time, the new measurement with the Planck …
We demonstrate that the observed cosmological excess of matter over antimatter may originate from a heavy QCD axion that solves the strong CP problem but has a mass much larger than that given by the Standard Model QCD strong dynamics. We investigate a rotation of the heavy QCD axion in field space, which is transferred into a baryon asymmetry through weak and strong sphaleron processes. This provides a strong cosmological motivation for heavy QCD axions, which are of high experimental interest. The viable parameter space has an axion mass $m_a$ between 1~MeV and 10 GeV and a decay constant $f…
We look for oscillating signals in the primordial bispectrum from new physics heavy particles which are visibly large for next generation large scale structures (LSS) survey. We show that in ordinary inflation scenarios where a slow-rolling inflaton generates density fluctuations and with no breaking of scale invariance or spacetime symmetry, there exist no naturally large signals unless the rolling inflaton generates a parity-odd chemical potential for the heavy particles. We estimate the accessibility of this signal through observations. While current CMB data are already sensitive in the mo…
Towards a complete scheme of cosmological neutrino self-interactions: Collision term for a wide range of mediator masses
Centro de Investigación y de Estudios Avanzados del Instituto Politécnico Nacional（墨西哥国立理工学院高级研究中心）；Secretaría de Ciencia, Humanidades, Tecnología e Innovación（科学、人文、技术与创新秘书处）；Instituto de Ciencias Físicas, Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México（墨西哥国立自治大学物理科学研究所）；Tecnológico de Monterrey, Escuela de Ingeniería y Ciencias（蒙特雷理工学院工程与科学学院）
We show that a Majorana heavy neutrino with a mass O(100TeV) is a good candidate particle for cold dark matter. It can be responsible for the majority of the cosmological diffuse photon background owing to lifetime of the order of O(10^(25)s), dominantly fixed by the radiative two-body decay. The lifetime is suppressed by two mechanisms: the leptonic GIM cancellation and the see-saw weak coupling suppression. As a fermion cold dark matter particle, a heavy neutrino favours the average mass density of the Universe constrained by the Einstein-Cartan cosmology.
Combining pre- and post-recombination new physics to address cosmological tensions: case study with varying electron mass and sign-switching cosmological constant
In these lectures I discuss cosmological phase transitions with the goal of establishing the possibility of observational consequences. I argue that the {\em only} phase transition amenable of experimental study within the foreseeable future is that predicted by QCD and discuss some of the potential observational cosmological consequences associated with this phase transition(s). I describe the experimental effort to study the QCD phase transition(s) at RHIC and SPS and summarize some of the recent experimental results. The possibility of novel phases of QCD in the core of pulsars is discussed…
A generic feature of gauge-mediated supersymmetry breaking models is that the gravitino is the lightest supersymmetric particle (LSP). In order not to overclose the universe, the gravitino LSP should be light enough (~ 1 keV), or appropriately heavy (~ 1 GeV). We study further constraints on the mass of the gravitino imposed by electroweak experiments, i.e., muon g-2 measurements, electroweak precision measurements, and direct searches for supersymmetric particles at LEP2. We find that the heavy gravitino is strongly disfavored from the lower mass bound on the next-to-LSP. The sufficiently lig…
The signal for a highly boosted heavy resonance competing against a background of light parton jets at the LHC can be enhanced by analyzing subjets in the "fat" jet that possibly contains the heavy resonance. Three methods for doing this are known as filtering, pruning, and trimming. We study the possibility of combining these methods using a relative likelihood approach. We find that, because the methods are not the same, one achieves an enhanced statistical power by combining them. We illustrate the possibilities first with a simple problem of combining trimming and pruning to enhance the si…
We discuss how the cosmological baryon asymmetry can be achieved by the lepton family asymmetries of heavy Majorana neutrino decays and they are related to CP violation in neutrino oscillation, in the minimal seesaw model with two heavy Majorana neutrinos. We derive the most general formula for CP violation in neutrino oscillation in terms of the heavy Majorana masses and Yukawa mass term. It is shown that the formula is very useful to classify several models in which $e-$, $μ-$ and $τ-$leptogenesis can be separately realized and to see how they are connected with low energy CP violaton. To ma…
If the neutrino mass is non-zero, as hinted by several experiments, then R-parity-violating supersymmetric Yukawa couplings can drive a heavy neutrino decay into lighter states. The heavy neutrino may either decay radiatively into a lighter neutrino, or it may decay into three light neutrinos through a Z-mediated penguin. For a given mass of the decaying neutrino, we calculate its lifetime for the various modes, each mode requiring certain pairs of R-parity-violating couplings be non-zero. We then check whether the calculated lifetimes fall in zones allowed or excluded by cosmological requirem…
We derive an effective action combining chiral and heavy quark symmetry, using approximate bosonization techniques of QCD. We explicitly show that the heavy-quark limit is compatible with the large $N_c$ (number of color) limit in the meson sector, and derive specific couplings between the light and heavy mesons ($D$, $D^*$, ...) and their chiral partners. The relevance of this effective action to solitons with heavy quarks describing heavy baryons is discussed.
Axions seem ubiquitous in string theories and some of them may be produced non-thermally by heavy scalar decays, contributing to dark radiation. We study various cosmological effects of photons produced from the axionic dark radiation through axion-photon conversion in the presence of primordial magnetic fields, and derive tight constraints on the combination of the axion-photon coupling and the primordial magnetic field.
Very recently a novel implementation of type-II seesaw mechanism for neutrino mass has been proposed in SU(5) grand unified theory with a number of desirable new physical phenomena beyond the standard model.Introducing heavy right-haded neutrinos and extra fermion singlets, in this work we show how the type-I seeaw cancellation mechanism works in this SU(5) framework. Besides predicting verifiable LFV decays, we further show that the model predicts dominant double beta decay with normal hierarchy or inverted hierarchy of active light neutrino masses in concordance with cosmological bound. In a…
We update the globular cluster bound on massive ($m_a$ up to a few 100 keV) axion-like particles (ALP) interacting with photons. The production of such particles in the stellar core is dominated by the Primakoff $γ+ Ze\to Ze +a$ and by the photon coalescence process $γ+γ\to a$. The latter, which is predominant at high masses, was not included in previous estimations. Furthermore, we account for the possibility that axions decay inside the stellar core, a non-negligible effect at the masses and couplings we are considering here. Consequently, our result modifies considerably the previous constr…
Cosmological arguments proving that the universe is dominated by invisible non-baryonic matter are reviewed. Possible physical candidates for dark matter particles are discussed. A particular attention is paid to non-compensated remnants of vacuum energy, to the question of stability of super-heavy relics, cosmological mass bounds for very heavy neutral lepton, and some other more exotic possibilities.
We study the type-I seesaw model with three right-handed neutrinos and Majorana masses below the pion mass. In this mass range, the model parameter space is not only strongly constrained by the requirement to explain the light neutrino masses, but also by experimental searches and cosmological considerations. In the existing literature, three disjoint regions of potentially viable parameter space have been identified. In one of them, all heavy neutrinos decay shortly before big bang nucleosynthesis. In the other two regions, one of the heavy neutrinos either decays between BBN and the CMB deco…
Cosmological and astrophysical effects of heavy (10 - 200 MeV) sterile Dirac neutrinos, mixed with the active ones, are considered. The bounds on mass and mixing angle from both supernovae and big-bang nucleosynthesis are presented.
We present a coupled channel unitary approach to obtain states dynamically generated from the meson baryon interaction with hidden charm, using constraints of heavy quark spin symmetry. We use as basis of states, $\bar D B$, $\bar D^* B$ states, with $B$ baryon charmed states belonging to the 20 representations of SU(4) with $J^P=1/2^+,~3/2^+$. In addition we also include the $η_c N$ and $J/ψN$ states. The inclusion of these coupled channels is demanded by heavy quark spin symmetry, since in the large $m_Q$ limit the $D$ and $D^*$ states are degenerate and are obtained from each other by means…
Cosmological issues of the gravitino production by the decay of a heavy scalar field $X$ are examined, assuming that the damped coherent oscillation of the scalar once dominates the energy of the universe. The coupling of the scalar field to a gravitino pair is estimated both in spontaneous and explicit supersymmetry breaking scenarios, with the result that it is proportional to the vacuum expectation value of the scalar field in general. Cosmological constraints depend on whether the gravitino is stable or not, and we study each case separately. For the unstable gravitino with $M_{3/2} \sim$ …
Within the so-called cosmological collider program, imprints of new particles on primordial non-Gaussianities have been studied intensively. In particular, their non-analytic features in the soft limit provide a smoking gun for new particles at the inflation scale. While this approach is very powerful to probe particles of the mass near the Hubble scale, the signal is exponentially suppressed for heavy particles. In this paper, to enlarge the scope of the cosmological collider, we explore a new approach to probing spins of heavy particles from signs of Wilson coefficients of the inflaton effec…
We extend the Standard Model by adding a second Higgs doublet and a right-handed neutrino singlet with a heavy Majorana mass term. In this model, there are one heavy and three light Majorana neutrinos with a mass hierarchy m_3 >> m_2 >> m_1 such that that only m_3 is non-zero at the tree level and light because of the seesaw mechanism, m_2 is generated at the one-loop and m_1 at the two-loop level. We show that the atmospheric neutrino oscillations and large mixing MSW solar neutrino transitions with $Δm^2_\mathrm{atm} \simeq m_3^2$ and $Δm^2_\mathrm{solar} \simeq m_2^2$, respectively, are nat…
We construct an extension of the Standard Model (SM) which is based on grand unification with Pati-Salam symmetry. The setup is supplemented with the idea of spontaneous flavour symmetry breaking which is mediated through flavon fields with renormalizable couplings to new heavy fermions. While we argue that the new gauge bosons in this approach can be sufficiently heavy to be irrelevant at low energies, the fermionic partners of the SM quarks, in particular those for the third generation, can be relatively light and provide new sources of flavour violation. The size of the effects is constrain…
We consider a cosmologically consistent scenario with a heavy Polonyi field. The Polonyi field with a mass of ${\cal O}(100){\rm\,TeV}$ decays before the Big-Bang Nucleosynthesis (BBN) and avoids the severe constraint from the BBN. However, the abundance of the Lightest Supersymmetric Particle (LSP) produced from the decay often exceeds the observed dark matter density. In our scenario, the dark matter density is obtained by the LSP abundance with an aid of entropy production, and baryon asymmetry is generated by the Affleck-Dine mechanism. We show that the observed baryon-to-dark matter ratio…
In some models of supersymmetry breaking, modulus fields are heavy enough to decay before BBN. But the large entropy produced via moduli decay significantly dilutes the preexisting baryon asymmetry of the universe. We study whether Affleck-Dine mechanism can provide enough baryon asymmetry which survives the dilution, and find several situations in which desirable amount of baryon number remains after the dilution. The possibility of non-thermal dark matter is also discussed. This provides the realistic cosmological scenario with heavy moduli.
We present the details of a deconstructed model that incorporates both Higgsless and top-color mechanisms. The model alleviates the tension between obtaining the correct top quark mass and keeping Delta rho small that exists in many Higgsless models. It does so by singling out the top quark mass generation as arising from a Yukawa coupling to an effective top-Higgs which develops a small vacuum expectation value, while electroweak symmetry breaking results largely from a Higgsless mechanism. As a result, the heavy partners of the standard model fermions can be light enough to be seen at the LH…
We investigate the mixing of heavy gauge singlet neutrinos in a mirror matter model employing the seesaw mechanism. The parameter constraints that must be satisfied to prevent the overproduction of mirror matter in the early universe are deduced. We find that no fine tuning in the heavy neutral fermion sector is required for this mirror matter model to satisfy cosmological constraints. Baryogenesis scenarios are briefly discussed in the context of the mirror model.
We revisit the decoupling effects associated with heavy particles in the renormalization group running of the vacuum energy in a mass-dependent renormalization scheme. We find the running of the vacuum energy stemming from the Higgs condensate in the entire energy range and show that it behaves as expected from the simple dimensional arguments meaning that it exhibits the quadratic sensitivity to the mass of the heavy particles in the infrared regime. The consequence of such a running to the fine-tuning problem with the measured value of the Cosmological Constant is analyzed and the constraint…
We present a showcase for deriving bounds on the neutrino masses from laboratory experiments and cosmological observations. We compare the frequentist and Bayesian bounds on the effective electron neutrino mass m_beta which the KATRIN neutrino mass experiment is expected to obtain, using both an analytical likelihood function and Monte Carlo simulations of KATRIN. Assuming a uniform prior in m_beta, we find that a null result yields an upper bound of about 0.17 eV at 90% confidence in the Bayesian analysis, to be compared with the frequentist KATRIN reference value of 0.20 eV. This is a signif…
Combining results on single-particle distributions with those of the Bose-Einstein correlation analysis in the same experiment, the space-time emission function is extracted as a function of time and longitudinal coordinate, as well as a function of transverse coordinates. While the former function resembles a boomerang for both types of collision (only shifted in the time direction due to the larger freeze-out time in heavy-ion collisions), the latter function is Gaussian for heavy-ion collisions, but ring-shaped for hadron-hadron collisions.
The CKM matrix element $|V_{cb}|$ can be extracted by combining data from experiments with lattice QCD results for the semileptonic form factors for the $\bar{B}\to D^{(*)} \ell \barν$ decays. The Oktay-Kronfeld (OK) action was designed to reduce heavy-quark discretization errors to below $1\%$, or through $\mathcal{O}(λ^3)$ in HQET power counting. Here we describe recent progress on bottom-to-charm currents improved to the same order in HQET as the OK action, and correct formerly reported results of our matching calculations, in which the operator basis was incomplete.
Leptogenesis in supersymmetric model is discussed comprehensively and in detail. In the first half, we discuss several leptogenesis mechanisms by the decay of heavy right-handed neutrino, which include the standard thermal leptogenesis, leptogenesis via inflaton decay, and leptogenesis from the coherent oscillation of the right-handed sneutrino. In the second half, we perform a detailed analysis on the leptogenesis via the LHu flat direction (Affleck-Dine leptogenesis).
The cosmological matter-antimatter asymmetry can originate from CP-violating interactions of seesaw Majorana neutrinos via leptogenesis in the thermal phase of the early universe. Having the cosmological CP-phase for leptogenesis requires at least two right-handed Majorana neutrinos. Using only the low energy neutrino observables we quantitatively reconstruct a minimal neutrino seesaw. We establish a general criterion for minimal seesaw schemes in which the cosmological CP-phase is {\it completely} reconstructed from the low energy CP-phases measured by neutrino oscillation and neutrinoless do…
Combining event-by-event hydrodynamics with heavy quark energy loss we compute correlations between the heavy and soft sectors for elliptic and triangular flow harmonics $v_2$ and $v_3$ of D$^0$ mesons in PbPb collisions at $2.76$ TeV and $5.02$ TeV. Our results indicate that $v_3$ is strongly influenced by the fragmentation temperature and that it builds up later than $v_2$ during the evolution of the system.
Every Wrinkle Carries A Memory: An Integro-differential Bootstrap for Features in Cosmological Correlators
Abdus Salam Centre for Theoretical Physics, Imperial College（阿卜杜斯·萨拉姆理论物理中心，帝国理工学院）；Department of Applied Mathematics and Theoretical Physics, University of Cambridge（剑桥大学应用数学与理论物理系）；Center for Theoretical Physics of the Universe, Institute for Basic Science（基础科学研究院宇宙理论物理中心）
