29 research outputs found
High precision fundamental constants at the TeV scale
This report summarizes the proceedings of the 2014 Mainz Institute for
Theoretical Physics (MITP) scientific program on "High precision fundamental
constants at the TeV scale". The two outstanding parameters in the Standard
Model dealt with during the MITP scientific program are the strong coupling
constant and the top-quark mass . Lacking knowledge on the
value of those fundamental constants is often the limiting factor in the
accuracy of theoretical predictions. The current status on and
has been reviewed and directions for future research have been identified.Comment: 57 pages, 24 figures, pdflate
Cosmological implications of the Higgs mass measurement
We assume the validity of the Standard Model up to an arbitrary high-energy
scale and discuss what information on the early stages of the Universe can be
extracted from a measurement of the Higgs mass. For Mh < 130 GeV, the Higgs
potential can develop an instability at large field values. From the absence of
excessive thermal Higgs field fluctuations we derive a bound on the reheat
temperature after inflation as a function of the Higgs and top masses. Then we
discuss the interplay between the quantum Higgs fluctuations generated during
the primordial stage of inflation and the cosmological perturbations, in the
context of landscape scenarios in which the inflationary parameters scan. We
show that, within the large-field models of inflation, it is highly improbable
to obtain the observed cosmological perturbations in a Universe with a light
Higgs. Moreover, independently of the inflationary model, the detection of
primordial tensor perturbations through the B-mode of CMB polarization and the
discovery of a light Higgs can simultaneously occur only with exponentially
small probability, unless there is new physics beyond the Standard Model.Comment: 28 LaTeX pages, 6 figure
Inclusive top-pair production phenomenology with TOPIXS
We discuss various aspects of inclusive top-quark pair production based on
TOPIXS, a new, flexible program that computes the production cross section at
the Tevatron and LHC at next-to-next-to-leading logarithmic accuracy in soft
and Coulomb resummation, including bound-state effects and the complete
next-to-next-to-leading order result in the q-qbar channel, which has recently
become available. We present the calculation of the top-pair cross section in
pp collisions at 8 TeV centre-of-mass energy, as well as the cross sections for
hypothetical heavy quarks in extensions of the standard model. The dependence
on the parton distribution input is studied. Further we investigate the impact
of LHC top cross section measurements at sqrt(s)=7 TeV on global fits of the
gluon distribution using the NNPDF re-weighting method.Comment: 27 pages, 5 figures; v2: corrected typos in Eqs. (2.8) and (6.2) and
the text, added footnote on page 4, matches published versio