Contextualizing the Higgs at the LHC

Recent excesses across different search modes of the collaborations at the LHC seem to indicate the presence of a Higgs-like scalar particle at 125 GeV. Using the current data sets, we review and update analyses addressing the extent to which this state is compatible with the Standard Model, and provide two contextual answers for how it might instead fit into alternative scenarios with enlarged electroweak symmetry breaking sectors.Comment: Contribution to the proceedings of PLHC 2012, Vancouver, BC, June 4-9, 201

Superconformal Technicolor

In supersymmetric theories with a strong conformal sector, soft supersymmetry breaking at the TeV scale naturally gives rise to confinement and chiral symmetry breaking at the same scale. We investigate models where such a sector dynamically breaks electroweak symmetry. We consider two scenarios, one where the strong dynamics induces vacuum expectation values for elementary Higgs fields, and another where the strong dynamics is solely responsible for electroweak symmetry breaking. In both cases there is no fine tuning required to explain the absence of a Higgs boson below the LEP bound, solving the supersymmetry naturalness problem. A good precision electroweak fit can be obtained, and quark and lepton masses are generated without flavor-changing neutral currents. Electroweak symmetry breaking may be dominated either by the elementary Higgs bosons or by the strong dynamics. In addition to standard superymmetry collider signals, these models predict production of multiple heavy standard model particles (t, W, Z, and b) from decays of resonances in the strong sector.Comment: 4 pages; v2: minor changes, references adde

Early Higgs Hints for Non-Minimal Supersymmetry

We discuss the role that Higgs coupling measurements can play in differentiating supersymmetric extensions of the Standard Model. Fitting current LHC data to the Higgs couplings, we find that the likelihood fit shows a preference in the direction of suppressed (enhanced) bottom (top) quark couplings. In the minimal supersymmetric Standard Model, we demonstrate that for tan beta > 1, there is tension in achieving such fermion couplings due to the structure of the Higgs quartic couplings. In anticipation of interpreting supersymmetric models with future data, we determine a single straightforward condition required to access the region of coupling space preferred by current data.Comment: 6 pages, 3 figures; v3: updated fits to include post-discovery data, references and discussion modified accordingl

Radion Mediated Flavor Changing Neutral Currents

In the context of a warped extra-dimension with Standard Model fields in the bulk, we obtain the general flavor structure of the Radion couplings to fermions and show that the result is independent on the particular nature of the Higgs mechanism (bulk or brane localized). These couplings will be generically misaligned with respect to the fermion mass matrix when the fermion bulk mass parameters are not all degenerate. When the Radion is light enough, the generic size of these tree-level flavor changing couplings will be strongly constrained by the experimental bounds on $\Delta F=2$ processes. At the LHC the possibility of a heavier Radion decaying into top and charm quarks is then considered as a promising signal to probe the flavor structure of both the Radion sector and the whole scenario.Comment: 4 pages, 2 figures, 1 tabl

Higgs Production from Gluon Fusion in Warped Extra Dimensions

We present an analysis of the loop-induced couplings of the Higgs boson to the massless gauge fields (gluons and photons) in the warped extra dimension models where all Standard Model fields propagate in the bulk. We show that in such models corrections to the hgg and $h{\gamma}{\gamma}$ couplings are potentially very large. These corrections can lead to generically sizable deviations in the production and decay rates of the Higgs boson, even when the new physics states lie beyond the direct reach of the LHC.Comment: 24 pages, 5 figures. Added Appendix C, minor changes in the text, replaced figures 2-

Flavor Violation Tests of Warped/Composite SM in the Two-Site Approach

We study flavor violation in the quark sector in a purely 4D, two-site effective field theory description of the Standard Model and just their first Kaluza-Klein excitations from a warped extra dimension. The warped 5D framework can provide solutions to both the Planck-weak and flavor hierarchies of the SM. It is also related (via the AdS/CFT correspondence) to partial compositeness of the SM. We focus on the dominant contributions in the two-site model to two observables which we argue provide the strongest flavor constraints, namely, epsilon_K and BR(b -> s gamma), where contributions in the two-site model occur at tree and loop-level, respectively. In particular, we demonstrate that a "tension" exists between these two observables in the sense that they have opposite dependence on composite site Yukawa couplings, making it difficult to decouple flavor-violating effects using this parameter. We choose the size of the composite site QCD coupling based on the relation of the two-site model to the 5D model (addressing the Planck-weak hierarchy), where we match the 5D QCD coupling to the 4D coupling at the loop-level and assuming negligible tree-level brane-localized kinetic terms. We estimate that a larger size of the 5D gauge coupling is constrained by the requirement of 5D perturbativity. We find that \sim O(5) TeV mass scale for the new particles in the two-site model can then be consistent with both observables. We also compare our analysis of epsilon_K in the two-site model to that in 5D models, including both the cases of a brane-localized and bulk Higgs.Comment: 46 pages with 10 figure

The higgs boson beyond standard model

We will review the status of the Higgs boson beyond Standard Model. This proceeding will be focused on the experimental and theoretical status of the Higgs boson in the Composite Higgs models. In particular we will discuss implications on the beyond Standard Model (BSM) Higgs coming from the observed excess at 125 GeV

Flavor Physics in the Models with Warped Extra Dimension

I will first briefly review the Standard Model and gauge hierarchy problem. Then I will present the Randall-Sundrum model with warped extra dimension, which provides an elegant geometrical solution to the hierarchy problem. The main focus of this thesis will be an analysis of the flavor violation in the models with warped extra dimension. First I will discuss the bounds on the scale of the extra dimension arising from the low energy physics. I will show that there is a tension in the parameter space coming from different low energy observables, and I will also discuss possible ways to relax these bounds. Another interesting feature of the warped models is that they generically predict flavor violation in the Higgs sector. I will discuss low energy flavor constraints on the Higgs mediated flavor violation as well as its signatures at the collider experiments. In the last part of this thesis I will discuss the physics of radion, a scalar degree of freedom of the five dimensional gravity multiplet, and I will show why it has interactions which are generically flavor misaligned leading to the observable flavor violation. This, combined with the fact that radion is likely to be the lightest new physics degree of freedom will lead to the interesting phenomenology both from perspective of collider phenomenology and low energy observables

Status of Composite Higgs

In these proceedings I will briefly describe the Composite Higgs constructions and then discuss their current experimental status

Challenges of EFT at the LHC

I will discuss the difficulties of putting constraints on the Effective Field Theories (EFT) at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC). In particular, I will analyse the generic properties of the 2 ! 2 scattering in the presence of the higher dimensional operators indicating that some of the beyond Standard Model effects are parametrically smaller than naive expectations