Probing TeV gravity at neutrino telescopes

Models with extra dimensions and the fundamental scale at the TeV could imply sign als in large neutrino telescopes due to gravitational scattering of cosmogenic neu trinos in the detection volume. Apart from the production of microscopic black hol es, extensively studied in the literature, we present gravity-mediated interactions at larger distances, that can be calculated in the e ikonal approximation. In these elastic processes the neutrino loses a small fracti on of energy to a hadronic shower and keeps going. The event rate of these events is higher than that of black hole formation and the signal is distinct: no charged leptons and possibly multiple-bang events.Comment: 5 pages; to appear in the proceedings of the Workshop on Exotic Physics with Neutrino Telesocpes, Uppsala 20-22 September 200

TeV gravity at neutrino telescopes

Cosmogenic neutrinos reach the Earth with energies around 10^9 GeV, and their interactions with matter will be measured in upcoming experiments (Auger, IceCube). Models with extra dimensions and the fundamental scale at the TeV could imply signals in these experiments. In particular, the production of microscopic black holes by cosmogenic neutrinos has been extensively studied in the literature. Here we make a complete analysis of gravity-mediated interactions at larger distances, where they can be calculated in the eikonal approximation. In these processes a neutrino of energy E_\nu interacts elastically with a parton inside a nucleon, loses a small fraction y of its energy, and starts a hadronic shower of energy y E_\nu << E_\nu. We analyze the ultraviolet dependence and the relevance of graviton emission in these processes, and show that they are negligible. We also study the energy distribution of cosmogenic events in AMANDA and IceCube and the possibility of multiple-bang events. For any neutrino flux, the observation of an enhanced rate of neutral current events above 100 TeV in neutrino telescopes could be explained by TeV-gravity interactions. The values of the fundamental scale of gravity that IceCube could reach are comparable to those to be explored at the LHC.Comment: 10 pages, 7 figures; new section on air showers added, version to be publishe

Weak Electric Dipole Moments of Heavy Fermions in the MSSM

A minimal supersymmetric version of the Standard Model with complex parameters allows contributions to the weak-electric dipole moments of fermions at the one-loop level. Assuming generation-diagonal trilinear soft-susy-breaking terms and the usual GUT constraint, a set of CP-violating physical phases can be introduced. In this paper the general expressions for the one-loop contribution to the WEDM in a generic renormalizable theory are given and the size of the WEDM of the tau lepton and the b quark in such a supersymmetric model is discussed.Comment: 12 pages, 1 ps + 4 eps figures, LaTeX using epsf.sty. Some comments and references added. Accepted in Phys. Lett. B. The complete ps-file is also available via WWW at http://www-itp.physik.uni-karlsruhe.de/prep/prep.htm

Top-Quark Production and Decay in the MSSM

We review the features of top-quark decays and loop-induced effects in the production cross section and CP-violating observables of e+e- -> t t-bar which are specific to the R-parity conserving Minimal Supersymmetric Standard Model (MSSM).Comment: LaTeX, 28 pages, 10 figures included, uses cite.sty. Contribution to the proceedings of the 2nd Joint ECFA/DESY Workshop on Physics and Detectors for a Linear Electron-Positron Collider. References adde

Cosmogenic neutrinos and signals of TeV gravity in air showers and neutrino telescopes

The existence of extra dimensions allows the possibility that the fundamental scale of gravity is at the TeV. If that is the case, gravity could dominate the interactions of ultra-high energy cosmic rays. In particular, the production of microscopic black holes by cosmogenic neutrinos has been estimated in a number of papers. We consider here gravity-mediated interactions at larger distances, where they can be calculated in the eikonal approximation. We show that for the expected flux of cosmogenic neutrinos these elastic processes give a stronger signal than black hole production in neutrino telescopes. Taking the bounds on the higher dimensional Planck mass M_D (D=4+n) from current air shower experiments, for n=2 (6) elastic collisions could produce up to 118 (34) events per year at IceCube. On the other hand, the absence of any signal would imply a bound of M_D>~5 TeV.Comment: 10 pages, 1 figure; version to appear in Phys. Rev. Let