Probing the Majorana nature of the neutrino with neutrinoless double beta decay

Neutrinoless double beta decay (NDBD) is the only experiment that could probe the Majorana nature of the neutrino. Here we study the theoretical implications of NDBD for models yielding tri-bimaximal lepton mixing like A4 and S4.Comment: Talk given at TAUP09, July 1-5, 2009 (Roma).The proceeding will be published in Journal of Physics, Conference Series (Editors: E. Coccia, L. Pandola, N. Fornengo, R. Aloisio

Calculable inverse-seesaw neutrino masses in supersymmetry

We provide a scenario where naturally small and calculable neutrino masses arise from a supersymmetry breaking renormalization-group-induced vacuum expectation value. We adopt a minimal supergravity scenario without ad hoc supersymmetric mass parameters. The lightest supersymmetric particle can be an isosinglet scalar neutrino state, potentially viable as WIMP dark matter through its Higgs new boson coupling. The scenario leads to a plethora of new phenomenological implications at accelerators including the Large Hadron Collider.Comment: LaTeX, 5 pages, 4 figures. Comments and references added. Final version to appear in PR

Flavor and electroweak symmetry breaking at the TeV scale

We present a unified picture of flavor and electroweak symmetry breaking at the TeV scale. Flavor and Higgs bosons arise as pseudo-Goldstone modes in a nonlinear sigma model. Explicit collective symmetry breaking yields stable vacuum expectation values and masses protected at one loop by the little-Higgs mechanism. The coupling to the fermions through a Yukawa lagrangian with a U(1) global flavor symmetry generates well-definite mass textures that correctly reproduce the mass hierarchies and mixings of quarks and leptons. The model is more constrained than usual little- Higgs models because of bounds on weak and flavor physics. The main experimental signatures testable at the LHC are a rather large mass mh0 = 317+/-80 GeV for the (lightest) Higgs boson and a characteristic spectrum of new bosons and fermions with masses around the TeV scale

The littlest Higgs is a cruiserweight

We study the exact (one-loop) effective potential of the littlest Higgs model and determine the dependence of physical quantities, such as the vacuum expectation value v_W and mass m_h of the Higgs boson, on the fundamental parameters of the Lagrangian--masses, couplings of new states, the fundamental scale f of the sigma model, and the coefficients of operators quadratically sensitive to the cutoff of the theory. On the one hand, we show that it is possible to have the electroweak ground state and a relatively large cutoff \Lambda = 4\pi f with f in the 2 TeV range without requiring unnaturally small coefficients for quadratically divergent quantities, and with only moderate cancellations between the contribution of different sectors to the effective potential of the Higgs. On the other hand, this cannot be achieved while at the same time keeping m_h close to its (bantamweight) current lower bound of 114.4 GeV. The natural expectation for m_h is O(f), mainly because of large logarithmically divergent contributions to the effective potential of the top-quark sector. Even a fine-tuning at the level of O(10^{-2}) in the coefficients of the quadratic divergences is not enough to produce small physical Higgs masses, and the natural expectation is in the 800 GeV range (cruiserweight) for f \sim 2 TeV. We conclude that the littlest Higgs model is a solution of the little hierarchy problem, in the sense that it stabilizes the electroweak symmetry breaking scale to be a factor of 100 less than the cutoff of the theory, but this requires a quite large physical mass for the Higgs, and hence precision electroweak studies should be redone accordingly. We also study finite temperature corrections.Comment: 18 pages, 9 figures, RevTex4. Final version accepted for publication in Phys. Rev.

LFV and Dipole Moments in Models with A4 Flavour Symmetry

It is presented an analysis on lepton flavour violating transitions, leptonic magnetic dipole moments and electric dipole moments in a class of models characterized by the flavour symmetry A4 x Z3 x U(1)_FN, whose choice is motivated by the approximate Tri-Bimaximal mixing observed in neutrino oscillations. A low-energy effective Lagrangian is constructed, where these effects are dominated by dimension six operators, suppressed by the scale M of new physics. All the flavour breaking effects are universally described by the vacuum expectation values of a set of spurions. Two separate cases, a supersymmetric and a general one, are described. An upper limit on the reactor angle of a few percent is concluded.Comment: 10 pages, 1 figure. Adapted from a talk given at "DISCRETE'08: Symposium on Prospects in the Physics of Discrete Symmetries", December 11-16 2008, Valencia, Spai

A Supersymmetric D4 Model for mu-tau Symmetry

We construct a supersymmeterized version of the model presented by Grimus and Lavoura (GL) in [1] which predicts theta_{23} maximal and theta_{13}=0 in the lepton sector. For this purpose, we extend the flavor group, which is D4 x Z2^{(aux)} in the original model, to D4 x Z5. An additional difference is the absence of right-handed neutrinos. Despite these changes the model is the same as the GL model, since theta_{23} maximal and theta_{13}=0 arise through the same mismatch of D4 subgroups, D2 in the charged lepton and Z2 in the neutrino sector. In our setup D4 is solely broken by gauge singlets, the flavons. We show that their vacuum structure, which leads to the prediction of theta_{13} and theta_{23}, is a natural result of the scalar potential. We find that the neutrino mass matrix only allows for inverted hierarchy, if we assume a certain form of spontaneous CP violation. The quantity |m_{ee}|, measured in neutrinoless double beta decay, is nearly equal to the lightest neutrino mass m3. The Majorana phases phi1 and phi2 are restricted to a certain range for m3 < 0.06 eV. We discuss the next-to-leading order corrections which give rise to shifts in the vacuum expectation values of the flavons. These induce deviations from maximal atmospheric mixing and vanishing theta_{13}. It turns out that these deviations are smaller for theta_{23} than for theta_{13}.Comment: 19 pages, 4 figure

Quark contact interactions at the LHC

Quark contact interactions are an important signal of new physics. We introduce a model in which the presence of a symmetry protects these new interactions from giving large corrections in flavor changing processes at low energies. This minimal model provides the basic set of operators which must be considered to contribute to the high-energy processes. To discuss their experimental signature in jet pairs produced in proton-proton colllisions, we simplify the number of possible operators down to two. We show (for a representative integrated luminosity of 200 pb^-1 at \surd s = 7 TeV) how the presence of two operators significantly modifies the bound on the characteristic energy scale of the contact interactions which is obtained by keeping a single operator.Comment: 8 pages, 2 figure