Portmerion, Proportion and Perspective

The holiday village of Portmerion was created by Bertram Clough Williams-Ellis (1883 1978) over a period of fifty-one years, starting in 1926. It was grade II listed in 1971. However, Portmerion has become a part of western popular culture rather than of mainstream architectural history. Its use as the setting for the cult 1967 television series “The Prisoner” ensures continued worldwide interest and a constant stream of visitors. Williams Ellis’ design methods were empirical, initial designs being adjusted by eye on site in close collaboration with trusted builders. This paper analyses the development of Portmerion as a gesamtkunstwerk; considering the experience of movement through the village as a dynamic composition of shifting vistas, focussing the visitor on a series of constructed views. Through this analysis, Portmerion is revealed as both a manifestation of the architecture of pleasure and an exercise in the pleasure of architecture

Consequences of Fine-Tuning for Fifth Force Searches

Light bosonic fields mediate long range forces between objects. If these fields have self-interactions, i.e., non-quadratic terms in the potential, the experimental constraints on such forces can be drastically altered due to a screening (chameleon) or enhancement effect. We explore how technically natural values for such self-interaction coupling constants modify the existing constraints. We point out that assuming the existence of these natural interactions leads to new constraints, contrary to the usual expectation that screening leads to gaps in coverage. We discuss how screening can turn fundamentally equivalence principle (EP)-preserving forces into EP-violating ones. This means that when natural screening is present, searches for EP violation can be used to constrain EP-preserving forces. We show how this effect enables the recently discovered stellar triple system \textit{PSR J0337$+$1715} to place a powerful constraint on EP-preserving fifth forces. Finally, we demonstrate that technically natural cubic self-interactions modify the vacuum structure of the scalar potential, leading to new constraints from spontaneous and induced vacuum decay.Comment: 36 pages, 9 figures -- v3 reflects version published in JHE

Superpartners at LHC and Future Colliders: Predictions from Constrained Compactified M-Theory

We study a realistic top-down M-theory compactification with low-scale effective Supersymmetry, consistent with phenomenological constraints. A combination of top-down and generic phenomenological constraints fix the spectrum. The gluino mass is predicted to be about 1.5 TeV. Three and only three superpartner channels, $\tilde{g} \tilde{g}$, $\chi_2^0 \chi_1^\pm$ and $\chi_1^+ \chi_1^-$ (where $\chi_2^0, \chi_1^\pm$ are Wino-like), are expected to be observable at LHC-14. We also investigate the prospects of finding heavy squarks and Higgsinos at future colliders. Gluino-stop-top, gluino-sbottom-bottom associated production and first generation squark associated production should be observable at a 100 TeV collider, along with direct production of heavy Higgsinos. Within this framework the discovery of a single sparticle is sufficient to determine uniquely the SUSY spectrum, yielding a number of concrete testable predictions for LHC-14 and future colliders, and determination of $M_{3/2}$ and thereby other fundamental quantities.Comment: 19 pages, 4 figure

Mixed Heavy-Light Matching in the Universal One-Loop Effective Action

Recently, a general result for evaluating the path integral at one loop was obtained in the form of the Universal One-Loop Effective Action. It may be used to derive effective field theory operators of dimensions up to six, by evaluating the traces of matrices in this expression, with the mass-dependence encapsulated in the universal coefficients. Here we show that it can account for loops of mixed heavy-light particles in the matching procedure. Our prescription for computing these mixed contributions to the Wilson coefficients is conceptually simple. Moreover it has the advantage of maintaining the universal structure of the effective action, which we illustrate using the example of integrating out a heavy electroweak triplet scalar coupling to a light Higgs doublet. Finally we also identify new structures that were previously neglected in the universal results.Comment: 22 pages, 3 figures; v2: expanded discussion in Section 3, typos correcte

Extending the Universal One-Loop Effective Action: Heavy-Light Coefficients

The Universal One-Loop Effective Action (UOLEA) is a general expression for the effective action obtained by evaluating in a model-independent way the one-loop expansion of a functional path integral. It can be used to match UV theories to their low-energy EFTs more efficiently by avoiding redundant steps in the application of functional methods, simplifying the process of obtaining Wilson coefficients of operators up to dimension six. In addition to loops involving only heavy fields, matching may require the inclusion of loops containing both heavy and light particles. Here we use the recently-developed covariant diagram technique to extend the UOLEA to include heavy-light terms which retain the same universal structure as the previously-derived heavy-only terms. As an example of its application, we integrate out a heavy singlet scalar with a linear coupling to a light doublet Higgs. The extension presented here is a first step towards completing the UOLEA to incorporate all possible structures encountered in a covariant derivative expansion of the one-loop path integral.Comment: 20 pages, 1 figure, 5 tables, 1 Mathematica Noteboo