Composite Higgs models feature new strong dynamics leading to the description of the Higgs boson as a bound state arising from the breaking of a global (flavour) symmetry. These models generally include light states generated by the same dynamics, the detection of which may present the first observable signs of compositeness. One such state is a pseudo-scalar boson resulting from the breaking of a $U(1)$ symmetry common to most composite setups, and whose hints are expected to be visible through low-mass resonance searches at present and future hadron and lepton colliders. In this work we study the phenomenology of this pseudo-scalar field. We show that, for a light state, bottom quark loop effects dominantly impact the production cross section and considerably modify the decay pattern. Moreover, we make a case for targeted low-mass analyses at future lepton colliders, with an emphasis on high-luminosity machines aiming to operate at low centre-of-mass energies. We present a simplified outline of a search for this light pseudo-scalar at one such machine, considering electron-positron collisions at the $Z$-pole. We focus on a signature arising from the pseudo-scalar decay into a pair of hadronic taus and a production mode association with a pair of leptons of opposite electric charges, and compare cut and count methods with machine learning methods.
Composite Higgs models predict the existence of resonances. We study in detail the collider phenomenology of both the vector and fermionic resonances, including the possibility of both of them being light and within the reach of the LHC. We present current constraints from di-boson, di-lepton resonance searches and top partner pair searches on a set of simplified benchmark models based on the minimal coset $SO(5)/SO(4)$, and make projections for the reach of the HL-LHC. We find that the cascade decay channels for the vector resonances into top partners, or vice versa, can play an important rol…
Within a mirror type assignment for the excited composite fermions the neutrino mass term is built up from a Dirac mass, $m_*$, which gives the mass of charged lepton component of the $SU(2)$, right-handed, doublet, and a Majorana mass, $m_L$, for the left-handed component (singlet) of the excited neutrino. The mass matrix is diagonalized leading to two Majorana mass eigenstates. The active neutrino field $ν^*_R$ is thus a superposition of the two mass eigenstates with mixing coefficients which depend on the ratio $m_L/m_*$. We discuss the prospects of discovery of these physical states at the…
In composite Higgs (CH) models, large mixings between the top quark and the new strongly interacting sector are required to generate its sizeable Yukawa coupling. Precise measurements involving top as well as left-handed bottom quarks therefore offer an interesting opportunity to probe such new physics scenarios. We study the impact of third-generation-quark pair production at future lepton colliders, translating prospective effective-field-theory sensitivities into the CH parameter space. Our results show that one can probe a significant fraction of the natural CH parameter space through the …
We investigate the search for heavy Majorana neutrinos stemming from a composite model scenario at the upcoming LHC Run II at a center of mass energy of 13 TeV. While previous studies of the composite Majorana neutrino were focussed on gauge interactions via magnetic type transition coupling between ordinary and heavy fermions (with mass $m^*$) here we complement the composite model with contact interactions at the energy scale $Λ$ and we find that the production cross sections are dominated by such contact interactions by roughly two/three orders of magnitude. This mechanism provides therefor…
We present a phenomenological theory of scalar particles that transform as a sextet and an octet of QCD interactions. These particles may arise as light bound states of a fundamental dynamics giving rise to a composite Higgs boson and partial compositeness for the top. As a concrete example, we discuss an explicit UV completion based on the SU(4)/Sp(4) coset, where QCD colour is carried by additional fundamental fermions charged under the confining gauge group. Top partners, as well as potentially even lighter coloured scalars, arise as bound states of the coloured fermions. We study productio…
Minimal Composite Higgs Models (MCHM) have long provided a solution to the hierarchy problem of the Standard Model, yet suffer from various sources of fine tuning that are becoming increasingly problematic with the lack of new physics observations at the LHC. We develop a new fine tuning measure that accurately counts each contribution to fine tuning (single, double, triple, etc) that can occur in a theory with $n_p$ parameters, that must reproduce $n_o$ observables. We then use a novel scanning procedure to perform a comprehensive study of three different two-site, 4D, $SO(5)\rightarrow SO(4)…
Composite Higgs models (CHMs) offer an elegant solution to the naturalness problem of the Standard Model (SM). Their direct effects at particle colliders like the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) are thus of central interest. While no direct effects have been observed so far, there are recent indirect hints for new physics (NP) coming from measurements of rare B meson decays. This thesis studies direct collider constraints on CHMs as well as the question if these models can explain the hints for NP in rare B decays. The first part of this thesis gives a self-contained introduction to all main conce…
We investigate the phenomenology of a scalar top-philic dark matter candidate when adding a dimension-five contact interaction term, as motivated by possible underlying extensions of the Standard Model such as composite Higgs models. We show that the presence of contact interactions can have a major impact on the dark matter relic density as well as on its direct and indirect detection prospects, while the collider phenomenology of the model is unaffected. This underlines the complementarity of collider and cosmological constraints on dark matter models.
A toy-model with $SU(2)_{\rm TC}$ dynamics confined at high scales $Λ_{\rm TC}\gg 100$ GeV enables to construct Dirac UV completion from the original chiral multiplets predicting a vector-like nature of their weak interactions consistent with electroweak precision tests. In this work, we investigate a potential of the lightest scalar baryon-like (T-baryon) state $B^0=UD$ with mass $m_B\gtrsim 1$ TeV predicted by the simplest two-flavor vector-like confinement model as a Dark Matter (DM) candidate. We show that two different scenarios with the T-baryon relic abundance formation before and after…
We study the production of $t{\bar t}h$ and $t{\bar t}hh$ at hadron colliders, in the minimal Composite Higgs Models, based on the coset $SO(5)/SO(4)$. We explore the fermionic representations ${\bf 5}$ and ${\bf 14}$. A detailed phenomenological analysis is performed, covering the energy range of the LHC and its High Luminosity upgrade, as well as that of a future 100 TeV hadron collider. Both resonant and non-resonant production are considered, stressing the interplay and complementary interest of these channels with each other and double Higgs production. We provide sets of representative p…
We study the lepton-induced resonant production of color-adjoint leptons (leptogluons) at the LHC employing the lepton parton density function of the proton. We demonstrate that this production mechanism can be useful to extend the LHC ability to search for leptogluons beyond purely quark/gluon initiated production processes up to ~ 3.5 TeV leptogluon masses and O(1) TeV compositeness scales. Discerning leptogluons from scalar and vector leptoquarks is also possible in this channel, given a data sample containing the order of 100 signal events. We argue that the resonant channel can be combine…
We explore whether the axion which solves the strong CP problem can naturally be much lighter than the canonical QCD axion. The $Z_\mathcal{N}$ symmetry proposed by Hook, with $\mathcal{N}$ mirror and degenerate worlds coexisting in Nature and linked by the axion field, is considered in terms of generic effective axion couplings. We show that the total potential is safely approximated by a single cosine in the large $\mathcal{N}$ limit, and we determine the analytical formula for the exponentially suppressed axion mass. The resulting universal enhancement of all axion interactions relative to …
