The Unhiggs

We examine a scenario where the Higgs is part of an approximate conformal field theory, and has a scaling dimension greater than one. Such an unparticle Higgs (or Unhiggs) can still break electroweak symmetry and unitarize WW scattering, but its gauge couplings are suppressed. An Unhiggs model has a reduced sensitivity of the weak scale to the cutoff, and can thus provide a solution to the little hierarchy problem.Comment: 21 pages, 9 figures; v2: further discussion, references added, version published in JHE

The dimer-RVB State of the Four-Leg Heisenberg Ladder: Interference among Resonances

We study the ground state of the 4-leg spin ladder using a dimer-RVB ansatz and the Lanczos method. Besides the well known resonance mechanism between valence bond configurations we find novel interference effects among nearby resonances.Comment: 4 pages, RevTex, 7 eps fig

Antisymmetric multi-partite quantum states and their applications

Entanglement is a powerful resource for processing quantum information. In this context pure, maximally entangled states have received considerable attention. In the case of bipartite qubit-systems the four orthonormal Bell-states are of this type. One of these Bell states, the singlet Bell-state, has the additional property of being antisymmetric with respect to particle exchange. In this contribution we discuss possible generalizations of this antisymmetric Bell-state to cases with more than two particles and with single-particle Hilbert spaces involving more than two dimensions. We review basic properties of these totally antisymmetric states. Among possible applications of this class of states we analyze a new quantum key sharing protocol and methods for comparing quantum states