9,698 research outputs found
Electroweak Baryogenesis with Cosmic Strings ?
I report on a critical analysis of the scenario of electroweak baryogenesis
mediated by nonsuperconducting cosmic strings. This mechanism relies upon
electroweak symmetry restoration in a region around cosmic strings, where
sphalerons would be unsuppressed. I discuss the various problems this scenario
has to face, presenting a careful computation of the sphaleron rates inside the
strings, of the chemical potential for chiral number and of the efficiency of
baryogenesis in different regimes of string networks. The conclusion is that
the asymmetry in baryon number generated by this scenario is smaller than the
observed value by at least 10 orders of magnitude.Comment: 5 pages, uses sprocl.sty. Talk given at SEWM98, Dec.98, Copenhage
A Fresh Look at the Calculation of Tunneling Actions including Gravitational Effects
Recently, the calculation of tunneling actions, that control the exponential
suppression of the decay of metastable vacua, has been reformulated as an
elementary variational problem in field space. This paper extends this
formalism to include the effect of gravity. Considering tunneling potentials
that go from the false vacuum to some on the
stable basin of the scalar potential , the tunneling action is the
minimum of the functional , where , and is the reduced
Planck mass. This one-line simple result applies equally to AdS, Minkowski or
dS vacua decays and reproduces the Hawking-Moss action in the appropriate
cases. This formalism provides new handles for the theoretical understanding of
different features of vacuum decay in the presence of gravity.Comment: 12 pages in double-column format. 8 figures. Small changes, errata
fixe
New limits on the mass of neutral Higgses in General Models
In general electroweak models with weakly coupled (and otherwise arbitrary)
Higgs sector there always exists in the spectrum a scalar state with mass
controlled by the electroweak scale. A new and simple recipe to compute an
analytical tree-level upper bound on the mass of this light scalar is given. We
compare this new bound with similar ones existing in the literature and show
how to extract extra information on heavier neutral scalars in the spectrum
from the interplay of independent bounds. Production of these states at future
colliders is addressed and the implications for the decoupling limit in which
only one Higgs is expected to remain light are discussed.Comment: 14 pages, LaTe
What is the upper limit on the lightest supersymmetric Higgs mass?
In this talk the question of what is the upper bound on the lightest
supersymmetric Higgs mass, m_h is addressed. This question is relevant since
experimental lower bounds on m_h might implement, in the near future, exclusion
of supersymmetry. By imposing (perturbative) unification of the gauge couplings
at some high scale \simgt 10^{17} GeV, we have found that for a top-quark mass
M_t=175 GeV, and depending on the supersymmetric parameters, this bound can be
as high as 205 GeV.Comment: 7 pages, 4 figures, Work presented at PASCOS-98, March 22-29 199
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