Low-scale gaugino mediation, lots of leptons at the LHC

Low-scale gaugino mediation predicts that gauginos are significantly heavier than scalar superpartners. In order of increasing mass the lightest superpartners are the gravitino, right-handed sleptons and left-handed sleptons (no light neutralino!). This implies that squark decay chains pass through one or more sleptons and typical final states from squark and gluino production at the LHC include multiple leptons. In addition, left-handed staus have large branching fractions into right-handed staus and the Higgs. As an example, we compute the spectrum of low-scale deconstructed gaugino mediation. In this model gauginos acquire masses at tree level at 5 TeV while scalar masses are generated radiatively from the gaugino masses

Exact Results and Duality for SP(2N) SUSY Gauge Theories with an Antisymmetric Tensor

We study supersymmetric Sp(2N) gauge theories with matter in the antisymmetric tensor representation and F fundamentals. For F=6 we solve the theory exactly in terms of confined degrees of freedom and a superpotential. By adding mass terms we obtain the theories with F<6 which we find to exhibit a host of interesting non-perturbative phenomena: quantum deformed moduli spaces with N constraints, instanton-induced superpotentials and non-equivalent disjoint branches of moduli spaces. We find a simple dual for F=8 and no superpotential. We show how the F=4 and F=2 theories can be modified to break supersymmetry spontaneously and point out that the Sp(6) theory with F=6 may be very interesting for model builders.Comment: 15 pages, LaTe

A Systematic Approach to Confinement in N=1 Supersymmetric Gauge Theories

We give necessary criteria for N=1 supersymmetric theories to be in a smoothly confining phase without chiral symmetry breaking and with a dynamically generated superpotential. Using our general arguments we find all such confining SU and Sp theories with a single gauge group and no tree level superpotential.Comment: 8 pages, LaTe

Differentiation, Quantification and Identification of Abrin and Abrus precatorius Agglutinin

Abrin, the toxic lectin from the rosary pea plant Abrus precatorius, has gained considerable interest in the recent past due to its potential malevolent use. However, reliable and easy-to-use assays for the detection and discrimination of abrin from related plant proteins such as Abrus precatorius agglutinin or the homologous toxin ricin from Ricinus communis are sparse. To address this gap, a panel of highly specific monoclonal antibodies was generated against abrin and the related Abrus precatorius agglutinin. These antibodies were used to establish two sandwich ELISAs to preferentially detect abrin or A. precatorius agglutinin (limit of detection 22 pg/mL for abrin; 35 pg/mL for A. precatorius agglutinin). Furthermore, an abrin-specific lateral flow assay was developed for rapid on-site detection (limit of detection ~1 ng/mL abrin). Assays were validated for complex food, environmental and clinical matrices illustrating broad applicability in different threat scenarios. Additionally, the antibodies turned out to be suitable for immuno-enrichment strategies in combination with mass spectrometry-based approaches for unambiguous identification. Finally, we were able to demonstrate for the first time how the developed assays can be applied to detect, identify and quantify abrin from a clinical sample derived from an attempted suicide case involving A. precatorius.Peer Reviewe

Minimal Gaugino Mediation

We propose Minimal Gaugino Mediation as the simplest known solution to the supersymmetric flavor and CP problems. The framework predicts a very minimal structure for the soft parameters at ultra-high energies: gaugino masses are unified and non-vanishing whereas all other soft supersymmetry breaking parameters vanish. We show that this boundary condition naturally arises from a small extra dimension and present a complete model which includes a new extra-dimensional solution to the mu problem. We briefly discuss the predicted superpartner spectrum as a function of the two parameters of the model. The commonly ignored renormalization group evolution above the GUT scale is crucial to the viability of Minimal Gaugino Mediation but does not introduce new model dependence.Comment: LaTeX, 16 pages, 4 figures, running of the bottom and tau Yukawas included, plots revise

Higgs as a Holographic Pseudo-Goldstone Boson

The AdS/CFT correspondence allows to relate 4D strongly coupled theories to weakly coupled theories in 5D AdS. We use this correspondence to study a scenario in which the Higgs appears as a composite pseudo-Goldstone boson (PGB) of a strongly coupled theory. We show how a non-linearly realized global symmetry protects the Higgs mass and guarantees the absence of quadratic divergences at any loop order. The gauge and Yukawa interactions for the PGB Higgs are introduced in a simply way in the 5D AdS theory, and their one-loop contributions to the Higgs potential are calculated using perturbation theory. These contributions are finite, giving a squared-mass to the Higgs which is one-loop smaller than the mass of the first Kaluza-Klein state. We also show that if the symmetry breaking is caused by boundary conditions in the extra dimension, the PGB Higgs corresponds to the fifth component of the bulk gauge boson. To make the model fully realistic, a tree-level Higgs quartic coupling must be induced. We present a possible mechanism to generate it and discuss the conditions under which an unwanted large Higgs mass term is avoided.Comment: 31 pages, 6 figure

The Superpartner Spectrum of Gaugino Mediation

We compute the superpartner masses in a class of models with gaugino mediation (or no-scale) boundary conditions at a scale between the GUT and Planck scales. These models are compelling because they are simple, solve the supersymmetric flavor and CP problems, satisfy all constraints from colliders and cosmology, and predict the superpartner masses in terms of very few parameters. Our analysis includes the renormalization group evolution of the soft-breaking terms above the GUT scale. We show that the running above the GUT scale is largely model independent and find that a phenomenologically viable spectrum is obtained.Comment: 15 page

The Simplest Little Higgs

We show that the SU(3) little Higgs model has a region of parameter space in which electroweak symmetry breaking is natural and in which corrections to precision electroweak observables are sufficiently small. The model is anomaly free, generates a Higgs mass near 150 GeV, and predicts new gauge bosons and fermions at 1 TeV.Comment: 13 pages + appendix, typos corrected, version to appear in JHE

Evaluation of a Hydrogel-Based Diagnostic Approach for the Point-of-Care Based Detection of Neisseria gonorrhoeae

Eleven primer pairs were developed for the identification of Neisseria gonorrhoeae. The sensitivity and specificity of these primers were evaluated by Real Time (RT)-PCR melt curve analyses with DNA from 145 N. gonorrhoeae isolates and 40 other Neisseria or non-Neisseria species. Three primer pairs were further evaluated in a hydrogel-based RT-PCR detection platform, using DNA extracted from 50 N. gonorrhoeae cultures. We observed 100% sensitivity and specificity in the hydrogel assay, confirming its potential as a point-of-care test (POCT) for N. gonorrhoeae diagnosis