Gauge-Higgs Unification at the LHC

Higgs boson production by the gluon fusion and its decay into two photons at the LHC are investigated in the context of the gauge-Higgs unification scenario. The qualitative behaviors for these processes in the scenario are quite distinguishable from those of the Standard Model and the universal extra dimension scenario because of the overall sign difference for the effective couplings induced by one-loop corrections through Kaluza-Klein modes.Comment: 7 pages, 2 figures, To appear in the proceedings of 2009 Nagoya Global COE Workshop, Strong Coupling Gauge Theories in LHC era (SCGT09), December 8-11 2009, Nagoya, Japa

The Unificatory Power of Scientific Realism

The no-miracles argument (Putnam, 1975) holds that science is successful because successful theories are (approximately) true. Frost-Arnold (2010) objects that this argument is unacceptable because it generates neither new predictions nor unifications. It is similar to the unacceptable explanation that opium puts people to sleep because it has a dormative virtue. I reply that on close examination, realism explains not only why some theories are successful but also why successful theories exist in current science. Therefore, it unifies the disparate phenomena

String Consistency for Unified Model Building

We explore the use of real fermionization as a test case for understanding how specific features of phenomenological interest in the low-energy effective superpotential are realized in exact solutions to heterotic superstring theory. We present pedagogic examples of models which realize SO(10) as a level two current algebra on the world-sheet, and discuss in general how higher level current algebras can be realized in the tensor product of simple constituent conformal field theories. We describe formal developments necessary to compute couplings in models built using real fermionization. This allows us to isolate cases of spin structures where the standard prescription for real fermionization may break down.Comment: harvmac (available from xxx.lanl.gov), 30 pages (reduced format), if you are using harvmac for the first time, make sure to adjust the "site dependent options" at the beginning of the harvmac file. Shortened introduction and added table 3, listing the complete massless spectrum with U(1) charges of Model A. Version to appear in journa

750 GeV Diphotons from a D3-brane

Motivated by the recently reported diphoton excess at 750 GeV observed by both CMS and ATLAS, we study string-based particle physics models which can accommodate this signal. Quite remarkably, although Grand Unified Theories in F-theory tend to impose tight restrictions on candidate extra sectors, the case of a probe D3-brane near an E-type Yukawa point naturally leads to a class of strongly coupled models capable of accommodating the observed signature. In these models, the visible sector is realized by intersecting 7-branes, and the 750 GeV resonance is a scalar modulus associated with motion of the D3-brane in the direction transverse to the Standard Model 7-branes. Integrating out heavy 3-7 string messenger states leads to dimension five operators for gluon fusion production and diphoton decays. Due to the unified structure of interactions, these models also predict that there should be additional decay channels to ZZ and Z gamma. We also comment on models with distorted unification, where both the production mechanism and decay channels can differ.Comment: v3: 12 pages, 1 figure, clarifications adde