Accelerated expansion and the Goldstone ghost

A vacuum instability due to a massless ghost in a hidden sector can lead to an effective equation of state for dark energy that changes smoothly from $w=-3/2$ at large redshifts, to $w\approx-1.2$ today, to $w=-1$ in the future. We discuss how this ghost can be the Goldstone boson of Lorentz symmetry breaking, and we find that this breaking in the hidden sector should occur at a scale below $\sim$10 KeV. The normal particles that are produced along with the ghosts are then predominantly neutrinos.Comment: 12 pages, 2 figures, some improvement in discussion, published versio

Metacolor

A new mechanism is presented for the generation of quark and lepton masses, based on a heavy fourth family and a new sector of massless fermions. The massless fermions have only discrete chiral symmetries and they are confined by the metacolor force. The resulting electroweak corrections may be smaller than in technicolor theories.Comment: 11 pages, LaTeX, UTPT-93-09. (The title has changed from "Massless Technicolor" and more discussion of dynamics has been added.

Four-Fermion Dynamics and Fermion Masses

Four-fermion operators with large anomalous dimension may feed down mass to quarks and leptons from a heavy fourth family. No technicolor sector is required. A model illustrates the origin of the large top mass along with quark mass hierarchies and mass mixings.Comment: 15 pages, Postscript file, Based on a talk given at Yukawa International Seminar '95: From the Standard Model to Grand Unified Theories, Kyoto, Japan, 21-25 Aug 199

Comparison of 1/mQ^2 Corrections in Mesons and Baryons

We extend our relativistic quark model to the study of the decay Lambda_b -> Lambda_c ell nu and verify that the model satisfies the heavy-quark symmetry constraints at order 1/mQ^2. We isolate a strong dependence on a parameter which measures the relative distortion in the light-quark wave functions of the Lambda_b and Lambda_c. This parameter and the 1/mQ^2 corrections turn out to be small. The dependence on a corresponding parameter in the meson case leads to large 1/mQ^2 corrections.Comment: 9 pages, LaTeX, 3 self-contained LaTeX figures in separate fil

Single Production of Fourth Family b' Quark at the Large Hadron electron Collider

We examined the single production of fourth family b' quarks at the Large Hadron electron Collider (LHeC).We have analyzed the background and the signal processes for the mass range 300-800 GeV. We find the discovery region for an optimal parametrization of the Vqb' matrix elements.Comment: 12 pages, 8 figures, 2 table

The size of flavor changing effects induced by the symmetry breaking sector

It has recently been shown that strong interactions underlying electroweak symmetry breaking will induce four-fermion amplitudes proportional to m_t^2, which in turn will influence a variety of flavor changing processes. We argue that the size of these effects are likely to be far below the current experimental bounds.Comment: 5 pages, LaTeX, 1 figur