Physics of Brane Kinetic Terms

Models with extra dimensions may give new effects visible at future experiments. In these models, bulk fields can develop localized corrections to their kinetic terms which can modify the phenomenological predictions in a sizeable way. We review the case in which both gauge bosons and fermions propagate in the bulk, and discuss the limits on the parameter space arising from electroweak precision data.Comment: Presented at Matter To The Deepest: Recent Developments In Physics of Fundamental Interactions, XXVII International Conference of Theoretical Physics, Ustron 15-21 September 2003, Polan

Bulk fields with brane terms

In theories with branes, bulk fields get in general divergent corrections localized on these defects. Hence, the corresponding brane terms are renormalized and should be included in the effective theory from the very beginning. We review the phenomenology associated to brane kinetic terms for different spins and backgrounds, and point out that renormalization is required already at the classical level.Comment: Presented at HEP2003, International Europhysics Conference on High Energy Physics (July 17-23, 2003) Aachen, German

Observable contributions of new exotic quarks to quark mixing

Models with new vector-like quarks can produce observable quark mixing effects which are forbidden in the Standard Model. We classify all such models and write down the effective Lagrangian that results from integrating out the new quarks. We study the relations between neutral and charged currents and discuss how to distinguish among the different possibilities.Comment: 15 pages, 1 figure, typos corrected, version to appear in JHE

Bulk Fermions in Warped Models with a Soft Wall

We study bulk fermions in models with warped extra dimensions in the presence of a soft wall. Fermions can acquire a position dependent bulk Dirac mass that shields them from the deep infrared, allowing for a systematic expansion in which electroweak symmetry breaking effects are treated perturbatively. Using this expansion, we analyze properties of bulk fermions in the soft wall background. These properties include the realization of non-trivial boundary conditions that simulate the ones commonly used in hard wall models, the analysis of the flavor structure of the model and the implications of a heavy top. We implement a soft wall model of electroweak symmetry breaking with custodial symmetry and fermions propagating in the bulk. We find a lower bound on the masses of the first bosonic resonances, after including the effects of the top sector on electroweak precision observables for the first time, of m_{KK} \gtrsim 1-3 TeV at the 95% C.L., depending on the details of the Higgs, and discuss the implications of our results for LHC phenomenology.Comment: 34 pages, 8 figure

Possible duality violations in tau decay and their impact on the determination of alpha_s

We discuss the issue of duality violations in hadronic tau decay. After introducing a physically motivated ansatz for duality violations, we estimate their possible size by fitting this ansatz to the tau experimental data provided by the ALEPH collaboration. Our conclusion is that these data do not exclude significant duality violations in tau decay. This may imply an additional systematic error in the value of alpha_s(m_tau), extracted from tau decay, as large as \delta alpha_s(m_tau) \sim 0.003-0.010 .Comment: 20 pages, 4 figures. Minor fixes in the Appendi