A sharp incisor tool for predator house mice back to the wild

The house mouse (Mus musculus domesticus), as a successful invasive species worldwide, has to forage a variety of resources. Subantarctic mice display among the most notable diet shift from the usual omnivorous–granivorous diet, relying on a larger proportion of terrestrial animal prey. In agreement, a recent study of their mandible morphology evidenced an evolution of their mandible shape to optimize incisor biting and hence seize preys. Here, the incisors themselves are the focus of a morphometric analysis combined with a 3D study of their internal structure, aiming at a comparison between subantarctic populations (Guillou island, Kerguelen archipelago) with a range of western European continental, commensal mice. The predatory foraging behavior of Guillou mice was indeed associated with a sharper bevel of the lower incisor, which appears as an efficient morphology for piercing prey. The incisor of these mice also displays a reduced pulp cavity, suggesting slower eruption counterbalancing a reduced abrasion on such soft food material. The dynamics of the ever‐growing incisor may thus allow adaptive incisor sculpting and participate to the success of mice in foraging diverse resources

The 2-loop MSSM finite temperature effective potential with stop condensation

We calculate the finite temperature 2-loop effective potential in the MSSM with stop condensation, using a 3-dimensional effective theory. We find that in a part of the parameter space, a two-stage electroweak phase transition appears possible. The first stage would be the formation of a stop condensate, and the second stage is the transition to the standard electroweak minimum. The two-stage transition could significantly relax the baryon erasure bounds, but the parameter space allowing it (m_H \lsim 100 GeV, m_tR \sim 155-160 GeV) is not very large. We estimate the reliability of our results using renormalization scale and gauge dependence. Finally we discuss some real-time aspects relevant for the viability of the two-stage scenario.Comment: 30 pages, 7 figure

Effective Lagrangian description of the lepton flavor violating decays Z-->li lj

A comprehensive analysis of the lepton flavor violating (LFV) decays Z-->li lj is presented within the effective Lagrangian approach. Both the decoupling and nondecoupling scenarios are explored. The experimental constraints from li --> lj lk \bar{lk} and li -->lj gamma as well as some relationships arising from the gauge invariance of the effective Lagrangian are used to put constraints on Z-->li lj. It is found that while current experimental data impose very strong constraints on Z-->mu e, the channel Z --> tau mu (e)still may be at the reach of the planned TESLA collider.Comment: References added, final version to appear in Physical Review

Supersymmetric Baryogenesis and Flavor Physics

We study the flavor physics implications of baryogenesis in the Minimal Supersymmetric Standard Model. Enhanced $B-\bar B$ mixing and $b \to s \gamma$ rates are generic to all scenarios. Depending on the origin of the CP violating phase responsible for baryogenesis there could be a large neutron electric dipole moment, large CP violating $D-\bar D$ mixing or CP violation in top quark production. We discuss how the combination of these measurements with the requirement of baryogenesis shed light on the MSSM parameter space and the source of CP violation.Comment: PRL version. Suppression factor explicitly identified below Eq. 5. More references added. Minor cosmetic changes in discussions. All results unchange

Supersymmetric contributions to Bˉs→ϕπ0\bar{B}_s \to \phi \pi^0 and Bˉs→ϕρ0\bar{B}_s \to \phi \rho^0 decays in SCET

We study the decay modes $\bar{B}_s\to \phi \pi^0$ and $\bar{B}_s\to \phi \rho^0$ using Soft Collinear Effective Theory. Within Standard Model and including the error due to the SU(3) breaking effect in the SCET parameters we find that BR $\bar{B}_s\to \phi \pi^0 =7_{-1-2}^{+1+2}\times 10^{-8}$ and BR $\bar{B}_s\to \phi \pi^0=9_{-1-4}^{+1+3}\times 10^{-8}$ corresponding to solution 1 and solution 2 of the SCET parameters respectively.For the decay mode $\bar{B}_s\to \phi \rho^0$, we find that BR $\bar{B}_s\to \phi \rho^0 = 20.2^{+1+9}_{-1-12}\times 10^{-8}$ and BR $\bar{B}_s\to \phi \rho^0 = 34.0^{+1.5 + 15}_{-1.5-22}\times 10^{-8}$ corresponding to solution 1 and solution 2 of the SCET parameters respectively. We extend our study to include supersymmetric models with non-universal A-terms where the dominant contributions arise from diagrams mediated by gluino and chargino exchanges. We show that gluino contributions can not lead to an enhancement of the branching ratios of $\bar{B}_s\to \phi \pi^0$ and $\bar{B}_s\to \phi \rho^0$. In addition, we show that SUSY contributions mediated by chargino exchange can enhance the branching ratio of $\bar{B}_s\to \phi \pi^0$ by about 14% with respect to the SM prediction. For the branching ratio of $\bar{B}_s\to \phi \rho^0$, we find that SUSY contributions can enhance its value by about 1% with respect to the SM prediction.Comment: 25 pages,5 figures, version accepted for publicatio

Light Stop Decay in the MSSM with Minimal Flavour Violation

In supersymmetric scenarios with a light stop particle $\tilde{t}_1$ and a small mass difference to the lightest supersymmetric particle (LSP) assumed to be the lightest neutralino, the flavour changing neutral current decay $\tilde{t}_1 \to c \tilde{\chi}_1^0$ can be the dominant decay channel and can exceed the four-body stop decay for certain parameter values. In the framework of Minimal Flavour Violation (MFV) this decay is CKM-suppressed, thus inducing long stop lifetimes. Stop decay length measurements at the LHC can then be exploited to test models with minimal flavour breaking through Standard Model Yukawa couplings. The decay width has been given some time ago by an approximate formula, which takes into account the leading logarithms of the MFV scale. In this paper we calculate the exact one-loop decay width in the framework of MFV. The comparison with the approximate result exhibits deviations of the order of 10% for large MFV scales due to the neglected non-logarithmic terms in the approximate decay formula. The difference in the branching ratios is negligible. The large logarithms have to be resummed. The resummation is performed by the solution of the renormalization group equations. The comparison of the exact one-loop result and the tree level flavour changing neutral current decay, which incorporates the resummed logarithms, demonstrates that the resummation effects are important and should be taken into account.Comment: 29 page

Lepton Flavor Violation in Z and Lepton Decays in Supersymmetric Models

The observation of charged lepton flavor non-conservation would be a clear signature of physics beyond the Standard Model. In particular, supersymmetric (SUSY) models introduce mixings in the sneutrino and the charged slepton sectors which could imply flavor-changing processes at rates accessible to upcoming experiments. In this paper we analyze the possibility to observe Z --> lep_I lep_J in the GigaZ option of TESLA at DESY. We show that although models with SUSY masses above the current limits could predict a branching ratio BR(Z --> mu e) accessible to the experiment, they would imply an unobserved rate of mu --> e gamma and thus are excluded. In models with a small mixing angle between the first and the third (or the second and the third) slepton families GigaZ could observe Z --> tau mu (or Z --> tau e) consistently with present bounds on lep_J --> lep_I gamma. In contrast, if the mixing angles between the three slepton families are large the bounds from mu --> e gamma push these processes below the reach of GigaZ. We show that in this case the masses of the three slepton families must be strongly degenerated (with mass differences of order 10^{-3}). We update the limits on the slepton mass insertions delta_{LL,RR,LR} and discuss the correlation between flavor changing and g_mu-2 in SUSY models.Comment: 23 pages, 6 figures. Version to appear in Phys. Rev.

Baryogenesis at Low Reheating Temperatures

We note that the maximum temperature during reheating can be much greater than the reheating temperature $T_r$ at which the Universe becomes radiation dominated. We show that the Standard Model anomalous $(B+L)$-violating processes can therefore be in thermal equilibrium for 1 GeV \simlt T_{r}\ll 100 GeV. Electroweak baryogenesis could work and the traditional upper bound on the Higgs mass coming from the requirement of the preservation of the baryon asymmetry may be relaxed. Alternatively, the baryon asymmetry may be reprocessed by sphaleron transitions either from a $(B-L)$ asymmetry generated by the Affleck-Dine mechanism or from a chiral asymmetry between $e_R$ and $e_L$ in a $B-L = 0$ Universe. Our findings are also relevant to the production of the baryon asymmetry in large extra dimension models.Comment: 4 pages, version to appear in PRL: references added, new titl

Novel sources of Flavor Changed Neutral Currents in the 331RHN331_{RHN} model

Sources of Flavor Changed Neutral Currents (FCNC) naturally emerge from a well motivated framework called 3-3-1 with right-handed neutrinos model, $331_{RHN}$ for short, mediated by an extra neutral gauge boson $Z^{\prime}$. Following previous works we calculate these sources and in addition we derive new ones coming from CP-even and -odd neutral scalars which appear due to their non-diagonal interactions with the physical standard quarks. Furthermore we show that bounds related to the neutral mesons systems $K_L-K_S$ and $D_1^0 - D_2^0$ may be significantly strengthened in the presence of these new interactions allowing us to infer stronger constraints on the parameter space of the model.Comment: Published version. 10 pages, 6 figure

Gravitino constraints on models of neutrino masses and leptogenesis

In the supersymmetric extensions of the standard model, neutrino masses and leptogenesis requires existence of new particles. We point out that if these particles with lepton number violating interactions have standard model gauge interactions, then they may not be created after reheating because of the gravitino problem. This will rule out all existing models of neutrino masses and leptogenesis, except the one with right-handed singlet neutrinos.Comment: 12 pages latex file with one postscript figur