Natural Islands for a 125 GeV Higgs in the scale-invariant NMSSM

We study whether a 125 GeV standard model-like Higgs boson can be accommodated within the scale-invariant NMSSM in a way that is natural in all respects, i.e., not only is the stop mass and hence its loop contribution to Higgs mass of natural size, but we do not allow significant tuning of NMSSM parameters as well. We pursue as much as possible an analytic approach which gives clear insights on various ways to accommodate such a Higgs mass, while conducting complementary numerical analyses. We consider both scenarios with singlet-like state being heavier and lighter than SM-like Higgs. With A-terms being small, we find for the NMSSM to be perturbative up to GUT scale, it is not possible to get 125 GeV Higgs mass, which is true even if we tune parameters of NMSSM. If we allow some of the couplings to become non-perturbative below the GUT scale, then the non-tuned option implies that the singlet self-coupling, kappa, is larger than the singlet-Higgs coupling, lambda, which itself is order 1. This leads to a Landau pole for these couplings close to the weak scale, in particular below ~10^4 TeV. In both the perturbative and non-perturbative NMSSM, allowing large A_lambda, A_kappa gives "more room" to accommodate a 125 GeV Higgs, but a tuning of these A-terms may be needed. In our analysis we also conduct a careful study of the constraints on the parameter space from requiring global stability of the desired vacuum fitting a 125 GeV Higgs, which is complementary to existing literature. In particular, as the singlet-Higgs coupling lambda increases, vacuum stability becomes more serious of an issue.Comment: 34 pages, 4 figures, references added, minor corrections to text and figures, version to be published in JHE

Nanoporous ultra-high specific surface inorganic fibres

Nanoporous inorganic (silica) nanofibres with ultra-high specific surface have been fabricated by electrospinning the blend solutions of poly(vinyl alcohol) (PVA) and colloidal silica nanoparticles, followed by selective removal of the PVA component. The configurations of the composite and inorganic nanofibres were investigated by changing the average silica particle diameters and the concentrations of colloidal silica particles in polymer solutions. After the removal of PVA by calcination, the fibre shape of pure silica particle assembly was maintained. The nanoporous silica fibres were assembled as a porous membrane with a high surface roughness. From the results of Brunauer-Emmett-Teller (BET) measurements, the BET surface area of inorganic silica nanofibrous membranes was increased with the decrease of the particle diameters. The membrane composed of silica particles with diameters of 15 nm showed the largest BET surface area of 270.3 m(2) g(-1) and total pore volume of 0.66 cm(3) g(-1). The physical absorption of methylene blue dye molecules by nanoporous silica membranes was examined using UV-vis spectrometry. Additionally, the porous silica membranes modified with fluoroalkylsilane showed super-hydrophobicity due to their porous structures

TeV scale mirage mediation in NMSSM

We study the next-to-minimal supersymmetric standard model. We consider soft supersymmetry breaking parameters, which are induced by the mirage mediation mechanism of supersymmetry breaking. We concentrate on the mirage mediation, where the so-called mirage scale is the TeV scale. In this scenario, we can realize the up-type Higgs soft mass of O(200) GeV, while other masses such as gaugino masses and stop masses are heavy such as 1 TeV or more. Cancellation between the effective \mu-term and the down-type Higgs soft mass ameliorates the fine-tuning in the electroweak symmetry breaking even for \mu=O(500) GeV. The mixing between the doublet and singlet Higgs bosons is suppressed by (\lambda/\kappa)/tan\beta. Then the lightest doublet Higgs mass naturally reaches 125 GeV lifted by the new quartic coupling. The higgsino and singlino are light and their linear combination is the lightest superparticle.Comment: 24 pages, 24 figures, Numerical analysis is replaced with the version calculated by NMSSMTools. Comments and references are added on the suppressed doublet-singlet mixing and cases in which the 125 GeV boson is the 2nd lightest CP-even scalar. The version accepted by JHE

Higgs Portal to Visible Supersymmetry Breaking

We propose a supersymmetric extension of the standard model whose Higgs sector induces a spontaneous supersymmetry breaking by itself. Unlike the minimal extension, the current Higgs mass bound can be evaded even at the tree-level without the help of the soft breaking terms due to the usual hidden sector, as is reminiscent of the next to minimal case. We also have a possibly light pseudo-goldstino in our visible sector in addition to extra Higgs particles, both of which stem from supersymmetry breaking dynamics. In such a setup of visible supersymmetry breaking, we may see a part of supersymmetry breaking dynamics rather directly in future experiments.Comment: 23 pages, 6 figures, references adde

Higgs Boson Mass in Low Scale Gauge Mediation Models

We consider low scale gauge mediation models with a very light gravitino m_{3/2}~16 eV, in the light of recent experimental hints on the Higgs boson mass. The light gravitino is very interesting since there is no gravitino over-production problem, but it seems difficult to explain the Higgs boson mass of ~125 GeV. This is because of the conflict between the light gravitino mass and heavy SUSY particle masses needed for producing the relatively heavy Higgs boson mass. We consider two possible extensions in this paper: a singlet extension of the Higgs sector, and strongly coupled gauge mediation. We show that there is a large parameter space, in both scenarios, where the Higgs boson mass of ~125 GeV is explained without any conflict with such a very light gravitino.Comment: 23 pages, 5 figure

Peccei-Quinn NMSSM in the light of 125 GeV Higgs

We study the phenomenology of the Peccei-Quinn invariant extension of the next-to-minimal supersymmetric standard model (NMSSM) in view of the recent discovery of a 125 GeV Higgs boson. The minimal model having no quadratic and cubic terms of the NMSSM singlet field predicts a light singlino-like lightest supersymmetric particle (LSP). The model is strongly constrained by the Higgs invisible decay and the dark matter characteristic of the LSP, while some constraints can be relaxed by assuming that the saxion, the CP-even companion of the axion in the Peccei-Quinn sector, causes a late-time entropy production diluting the thermal LSP density. The collider signal of the model contains multi-jet and $h/W/Z$ plus missing energy, which can be discovered in the early stage of the 14 TeV LHC running.Comment: 40 pages, 10 figures, 6 tables. v3: references added, several statements added and corrected, comments on the small tadpole soft term added in sec. 2.

Enhanced Higgs associated production with a top quark pair in the NMSSM with light singlets

Precision measurements of the 125 GeV Higgs resonance recently discovered at the LHC have determined that its properties are similar to the ones of the Standard Model (SM) Higgs boson. However, the current uncertainties in the determination of the Higgs boson couplings leave room for significant deviations from the SM expectations. In fact, if one assumes no correlation between the top-quark and gluon couplings to the Higgs, the current global fit to the Higgs data lead to central values of the Higgs couplings to the bottom-quark and the top-quark that are about 2 $\sigma$ away from the SM predictions. In a previous work, we showed that such a scenario could be realized in the Next to Minimal Supersymmetric extension of the SM (NMSSM), for heavy singlets and light MSSM-like Higgs bosons and scalar top quarks, but for couplings that ruined the perturbative consistency of the theory up to the GUT scale. In this work we show that a perturbative consistent scenario, for somewhat heavier stops, may be obtained in the presence of light singlets. An interesting bonus of this scenario is the possibility of explaining an excess of events observed in CP-even Higgs searches at LEP2.Comment: 17 pages; v2: discussion on unphysical global minima and new benchmark table added; matches published versio