Accidental Goldstone Bosons

We study vacuum alignment in theories in which the chiral symmetry of a set of massless fermions is both spontaneously and explicitly broken. We find that transitions occur between different phases of the fermions' CP symmetry as parameters in their symmetry breaking Hamiltonian are varied. We identify a new phase that we call pseudoCP-conserving. We observe first and second-order transitions between the various phases. At a second-order (and possibly first-order) transition a pseudoGoldstone boson becomes massless as a consequence of a spontaneous change in the discrete, but not the continuous, symmetry of the ground state. We relate the masslessness of these ``accidental Goldstone bosons'' (AGBs) bosons to singularities of the order parameter for the phase transition. The relative frequency of CP-phase transitions makes it commonplace for the AGBs to be light, much lighter than their underlying strong interaction scale. We investigate the AGBs' potential for serving as light composite Higgs bosons by studying their vacuum expectation values, finding promising results: AGB vevs are also often much less than their strong scale.Comment: 27 pages, latex, with 12 postscript figure

An Effective Lagrangian for Low-Scale Technicolor

We present an effective Lagrangian for low-scale technicolor. It describes the interactions at energies near the mass of the lowest-lying bound states of the lightest technifermion doublet -- the spin-one $\rho_T,\omega_T, a_T, f_T$ and the corresponding technipions $\pi_T$. This Lagrangian is intended to put on firmer ground the technicolor straw-man phenomenology used for collider searches of low-scale technicolor. The technivectors are described using the hidden local symmetry (HLS) formalism of Bando et al. The Lagrangian is based on $SU(2)\otimes U(1)\otimes U(2)_L \otimes U(2)_R$, where $SU(2)\otimes U(1)$ is the electroweak gauge group and $U(2)_L \otimes U(2)_R$ is the HLS gauge group. Special attention is paid to the higher-derivative standard HLS and Wess-Zumino-Witten interactions needed to describe radiative and other decays of the $a_T$ and $\rho_T/\omega_T$, respectively.Comment: Updated introduction, to appear in Phys. Rev.

Integer Discontinuity of Density Functional Theory

Density functional approximations to the exchange-correlation energy of Kohn-Sham theory, such as the local density approximation and generalized gradient approximations, lack the well-known integer discontinuity, a feature that is critical to describe molecular dissociation correctly. Moreover, standard approximations to the exchange-correlation energy also fail to yield the correct linear dependence of the ground-state energy on the number of electrons when this is a non-integer number obtained from the grand canonical ensemble statistics. We present a formal framework to restore the integer discontinuity of any density functional approximation. Our formalism derives from a formula for the exact energy functional and a new constrained search functional that recovers the linear dependence of the energy on the number of electrons.Comment: 5 pages, 2 figure

CP violation and mixing in technicolor models

Vacuum alignment in technicolor models provides an attractive origin for the quarks' CP violation and, possibly, a natural solution for the strong-CP problem of QCD. We discuss these topics in this paper. Then we apply them to determine plausible mixing matrices for left and right-handed quarks. These matrices determine the Cabibbo-Kobayashi-Maskawa matrix as well as new mixing angles and phases that are observable in extended technicolor (ETC) and topcolor (TC2) interactions. We determine the contributions of these new interactions to CP-violating and mixing observables in the K0, Bd and Bs systems. Consistency with mixing and CP violation in the K0 system requires assuming that ETC interactions are electroweak generation-conserving even if technicolor has a walking gauge coupling. Large ETC gauge boson masses and small intergenerational mixing then result in negligibly small ETC contributions to B-meson mixing and CP violation and to Re(ϵ′/ϵ). We confirm our earlier strong lower bounds on TC2 gauge boson masses from Bd–¯¯¯Bd mixing. We then pay special attention to the possibility that current experiments indicate a deviation from standard model expectations of the values of sin2β measured in Bd→J/ψKS, ϕKS, η′KS, and πKS, studying the ability of TC2 to account for these. We also determine the TC2 contribution to ΔMBs and to Re(ϵ′/ϵ), and find them to be appreciable.First author draf