Dib Venturelli, Claudio Omar

The Search for Hidden Particles (SHiP) Collaboration has shown that the CERN SPS accelerator with its 400 GeV c proton beam offers a unique opportunity to explore the Hidden Sector [1–3]. The proposed experiment is an intensity frontier experiment which is capable of searching for hidden particles through both visible decays and through scattering signatures from recoil of electrons or nuclei. The high-intensity experimental facility developed by the SHiP Collaboration is based on a number of key features and developments which provide the possibility of probing a large part of the parameter space for a wide range of models with light long-lived superweakly interacting particles with masses up to O¹10º GeV c2 in an environment of extremely clean background conditions. This paper describes the proposal for the experimental facility together with the most important feasibility studies. The paper focuses on the challenging new ideas behind the beam extraction and beam delivery, the proton beam dump, and the suppression of beam-induced background.

Magnetars are a subclass of neutron stars whose intense soft-gamma-ray bursts and quiescent X-ray emission are believed to be powered by the decay of a strong internal magnetic field. We reanalyze neutrino emission in such stars in the plausibly relevant regime in which the Landau band spacing $\Delta E$ of both protons and electrons is much larger than kT (where k is the Boltzmann constant and T is the temperature), but still much smaller than the Fermi energies. Focusing on the direct Urca process, we find that the emissivity oscillates as a function of density or magnetic field, peaking when the Fermi level of the protons or electrons lies about $\sim$3 kT above the bottom of any of their Landau bands. The oscillation amplitude is comparable to the average emissivity when $\Delta E$ is roughly the geometric mean of kT and the Fermi energy (excluding mass), i.e., at fields much weaker than required to confine all particles to the lowest Landau band. Since the density and magnetic field strength vary continuously inside the neutron star, there will be alternating surfaces of high and low emissivity. Globally, these oscillations tend to average out, making it unclear whether there will be any observable effects.

Some of the outstanding questions of particle physics today concern the neutrino sector, in particular whether there are more neutrinos than those already known and whether they are Dirac or Majorana particles. There are different ways to explore these issues. In this article we describe neutrino-mediated decays of charged pseudoscalar mesons such as π±,K± and B±, in scenarios where extra neutrinos are heavy and can be on their mass shell. We discuss semileptonic and leptonic decays of such kinds. We investigate possible ways of using these decays in order to distinguish between the Dirac and Majorana character of neutrinos. Further, we argue that there are significant possibilities of detecting CP violation in such decays when there are at least two almost degenerate Majorana neutrinos involved. This latter type of scenario fits well into the known neutrino minimal standard model (νMSM) which could simultaneously explain the Dark Matter and Baryon Asymmetry of the Universe.

We analyze double Higgs boson production at the Large Hadron Collider in the context of Little Higgs models. In double Higgs production, the diagrams involved are directly related to those that cause the cancellation of the quadratic divergence of the Higgs self-energy, providing a robust prediction for this class of models. We find that in extensions of this model with the inclusion of a so-called T-parity, there is a significant enhancement in the cross sections as compared to the Standard Model.

We implement a minimal linear seesaw model (LSM) for addressing the Quasi-Dirac (QD) behaviour of heavy neutrinos, focusing on the mass regime of MN . MW . Here we show that for relatively low neutrino masses, covering the few GeV range, the same-sign to opposite-sign dilepton ratio, R`` , can be anywhere between 0 and 1, thus signaling a Quasi-Dirac regime. Particular values of R`` are controlled by the width of the QD neutrino and its mass splitting, the latter being equal to the light-neutrino mass mν in the LSM scenario. The current upper bound on mν1 together with the projected sensitivities of current and future |UN` | 2 experimental measurements, set stringent constraints on our low-scale QD mass regime. Some experimental prospects of testing the model by LHC displaced vertex searches are also discussed.

Abstract We consider light neutralinos of mass about 1 GeV, produced from τ lepton rare decays at Belle II, in the context of R-parity-violating (RPV) supersymmetry. With large and clean samples of τ leptons produced at the Belle II experiment, excellent sensitivity to such light neutralinos with the exotic signatures of displaced vertices is expected. We focus on two benchmark scenarios of single RPV operators, $$ {\lambda}_{311}^{\prime }{L}_3{Q}_1{\overline{D}}_1 $$ λ 311 ′ L 3 Q 1 D ¯ 1 and $$ {\lambda}_{312}^{\prime }{L}_3{Q}_1{\overline{D}}_2 $$ λ 312 ′ L 3 Q 1 D ¯ 2 , which induce both the production and decay of the lightest neutralino. For the reconstruction of a displaced vertex, we require at least two charged pions in the final states. We perform Monte-Carlo simulations for both signal and background events, and find that Belle II can explore regions in the parameter space competitive with other probes. In particular, for the $$ {\lambda}_{311}^{\prime } $$ λ 311 ′ scenario, it can put limits up to two orders of magnitude stronger than the current bounds.

We study two- and three-body lepton flavor violating (LFV) decays involving leptons and neu- tral vector bosons V = ρ0, ω, φ, J/ψ, Υ, Z0, as well as pseudoscalar P = π0, η, η′, ηc and scalar S = f0(500), f0(980), a0(980), χc0(1P ) mesons, without referring to a specific mechanism of LFV realization. In particular, we relate the rates of the three-body LFV decays τ (μ) → 3`, where ` = μ or e, to the two-body LFV decays (V, P ) → τ μ(τ e, μe), where V and P play the role of intermediate resonances in the decay process τ (μ) → 3`. From the experimental upper bounds for the branching ratios of τ (μ) → 3` decays, we derive upper limits for the branching ratios of (V, P ) → τ μ(τ e, μe). We compare our results to the available experimental data and known theoretical upper limits from previous studies of LFV processes and find that some of our limits are several orders of magnitude more stringent. Using the idea of quark-hadron duality, we extract limits on various quark-lepton dimension-six LFV operators from data on lepton decays. Some of these limits are either new or stronger than those existing in the literature.

In this work, we explore an extension of the Standard Model designed to elucidate the fermion mass hierarchy, account for the dark matter relic abundance, and explain the observed matter-antimatter asymmetry in the universe. Beyond the Standard Model particle content, our model introduces additional scalars and fermions. Notably, the light active neutrinos and the first two generations of charged fermions acquire masses at the one-loop level. The model accommodates successful low-scale leptogenesis, permitting the mass of the decaying heavy right-handed neutrino to be as low as 10 TeV. We conduct a detailed analysis of the dark matter phenomenology and explore various interesting phenomenological implications. These include charged lepton flavor violation, muon and electron anomalous magnetic moments, constraints arising from electroweak precision observables, and implications for collider experiments.

In scenarios of strongly coupled electroweak symmetry breaking, heavy composite particles of different spin and parity may arise and cause observable effects on signals that appear at loop levels. The recently observed process of Higgs to $\gamma \gamma$ at the LHC is one of such signals. We study the new constraints that are imposed on composite models from $H\to \gamma\gamma$, together with the existing constraints from the high precision electroweak tests. We use an effective chiral Lagrangian to describe the effective theory that contains the Standard Model spectrum and the extra composites below the electroweak scale. Considering the effective theory cutoff at $\Lambda = 4\pi v \sim 3 $ TeV, consistency with the $T$ and $S$ parameters and the newly observed $H\to \gamma \gamma$ can be found for a rather restricted range of masses of vector and axial-vector composites from $1.5$ TeV to $1.7$ TeV and $1.8$ TeV to $1.9$ TeV, respectively, and only provided a non-standard kinetic mixing between the $W^{3}$ and $B^{0}$ fields is included.

We study the process pp¯ → γγγ as a signal for associated photon–technipion production at the Tevatron. This is a clean signature with relatively low background. Resonant and non-resonant contributions are included and we show that technicolor models can be effectively probed in this mode