Including the Fermion Vacuum Fluctuations in the (2+1)(2+1) flavor Polyakov Quark Meson Model

We consider the $(2+1)$ flavor Polyakov Quark Meson Model and study the effect of including fermion vacuum fluctuations on the thermodynamics and phase diagram. The resulting model predictions are compared to the recent QCD lattice simulations by the HotQCD and Wuppertal-Budapest collaborations. The variation of the thermodynamic quantities across the phase transition region becomes smoother. This results in better agreement with the lattice data. Depending on the value of the mass of the sigma meson, including the vacuum term results in either pushing the critical end point into higher values of the chemical potential or excluding the possibility of a critical end point altogether.Comment: 15 figures, some parts rewritten, new figures adde

Clockworking FIMPs

We study freeze-in dark matter production in models that rely on the Clockwork mechanism to suppress the dark matter couplings to the visible sector. We construct viable scalar and fermionic dark matter models within this Clockwork FIMP scenario, with several subtleties that need to be taken into account revealed in the model-building process. We also provide analytic, semi-analytic and numerical results for the diagonalization of Clockwork-type mass matrices and briefly discuss the LHC phenomenology of the corresponding scenarios.Comment: 27 pages, 3 figures. Some typos in the appendices corrected. Accepted for JHE