Seesaw mechanism and the baryon asymmetry

I review the present understanding of connection between the non-zero neutrino masses and the baryon asymmetry of the Universe. The state-of-art results are presented for the standard thermal leptogenesis.Comment: Talk in Seesaw25, Paris, June 10-11, 200

Doubly Charged Higgsino Pair Production and Decays in e+e- Collisions

In supersymmetric grand unified theories, light higgsino multiplets generally exist in addition to the familiar chargino/neutralino multiplets of the minimal supersymmetric extension of the Standard Model. The new multiplets may include doubly charged states $\tilde\Delta^{\pm\pm}$ and $\tilde\delta^{\pm\pm}$. We study the properties and the production channels of these novel higgsinos in $e^+e^-$ and $\gamma\gamma$ collisions, and investigate how their properties can be analyzed experimentally.Comment: LATEX, 25 pages, ps figures include

Single Top Production at the Next Generation Linear e+e- Colliders

Present limits on the top mass from LEP1 and Tevatron point to a top quark that is considerably heavier than the $W$ vector boson in the standard model. Hence, e+e- colliders with \sqrt{s} \simeq 300 GeV (the c.m. energy foreseen at the first phase of the Next Linear e+e- Collider) could be well below the energy threshold for real top-pair production. We argue that, if this is the case, single top production through the process e+e- --> t\bar{b}W- (\bar{t}bW+), where t\bar{b} (\bar{t}b) are produced mainly by means of a virtual W, becomes the dominant top production mechanism. Total cross sections and kinematical distributions are evaluated and numerical results are given in ranges of m_t and \sqrts{s} where single top production can be of relevance. The relative importance of virtual-W and virtual-t contributions to the process is discussed.Comment: 20 pages, LaTeX + feynman.tex, 10 compressed (tar.Z) postscript figures included in a separate uuencoded file, revised version of Rome1 Preprint n.979 (1993), Dec 29, 1993. (In this revised version -- accepted for publication on Zeit. fur Phys.C in Jan 24, 1994 -- some sentences and 3 new refs. have been added with respect to the first one

Impact of semi-annihilations on dark matter phenomenology - an example of Z_N symmetric scalar dark matter

We study the impact of semi-annihilations x_i x_j x_k X, where x_i is any dark matter and X is any standard model particle, on dark matter phenomenology. We formulate minimal scalar dark matter models with an extra doublet and a complex singlet that predict non-trivial dark matter phenomenology with semi-annihilation processes for different discrete Abelian symmetries Z_N, N>2. We implement two such example models with Z_3 and Z_4 symmetry in micrOMEGAs and work out their phenomenology. We show that both semi-annihilations and annihilations involving only particles from two different dark matter sectors significantly modify the dark matter relic abundance in this type of models. We also study the possibility of dark matter direct detection in XENON100 in those models.Comment: 17 pages, 4 figure

Evolving Planck Mass in Classically Scale-Invariant Theories

We consider classically scale-invariant theories with non-minimally coupled scalar fields, where the Planck mass and the hierarchy of physical scales are dynamically generated. The classical theories possess a fixed point, where scale invariance is spontaneously broken. In these theories, however, the Planck mass becomes unstable in the presence of explicit sources of scale invariance breaking, such as non-relativistic matter and cosmological constant terms. We quantify the constraints on such classical models from Big Bang Nucleosynthesis that lead to an upper bound on the non-minimal coupling and require trans-Planckian field values. We show that quantum corrections to the scalar potential can stabilise the fixed point close to the minimum of the Coleman-Weinberg potential. The time-averaged motion of the evolving fixed point is strongly suppressed, thus the limits on the evolving gravitational constant from Big Bang Nucleosynthesis and other measurements do not presently constrain this class of theories. Field oscillations around the fixed point, if not damped, contribute to the dark matter density of the Universe.Comment: 28 pages, 2 figures, version published in JHE