Hadron Collider Signatures for New Interactions of Top and Bottom Quarks

One of the main goals for hadron colliders is the study of the properties of the third generation quarks. We study the signatures for new TeV resonances that couple to top or bottom quarks both at the Tevatron Run II and at the LHC. We find that in the simplest production processes of Drell-Yan type at the Tevatron, the signals are overwhelmed by QCD backgrounds. We also find that it is possible to study these resonances when they are produced in association with a pair of heavy quarks or in association with a single top at the LHC.In particular, with an integrated luminosity of 300 fb$^{-1}$ at the LHC, it is possible to probe resonance masses up to around 2 TeV.Comment: 24 pages, 15 figures, Minor corrections, version to appear in Phys. Rev.

Updated Constraints on the Minimal Supergravity Model

Recently, refinements have been made on both the theoretical and experimental determinations of the i.) mass of the lightest Higgs scalar (m_h), ii.) relic density of cold dark matter in the universe (Omega_CDM h^2), iii.) branching fraction for radiative B decay BF(b \to s \gamma), iv.) muon anomalous magnetic moment (a_\mu), and v.) flavor violating decay B_s \to \mu^+\mu^-. Each of these quantities can be predicted in the MSSM, and each depends in a non-trivial way on the spectra of SUSY particles. In this paper, we present updated constraints from each of these quantities on the minimal supergravity (mSUGRA) model as embedded in the computer program ISAJET. The combination of constraints points to certain favored regions of model parameter space where collider and non-accelerator SUSY searches may be more focussed.Comment: 20 pages, 6 figures. Version published in JHE

Higgs-mediated leptonic decays of B_s and B_d mesons as probes of supersymmetry

If tan(beta) is large, down-type quark mass matrices and Yukawa couplings cannot be simultaneously diagonalized, and flavour violating couplings of the neutral Higgs bosons are induced at the 1-loop level. These couplings lead to Higgs-mediated contributions to the decays B_s -> mu+ mu- and B_d -> tau+ tau-, at a level that might be of interest for the current Tevatron run, or possibly, at B-factories. We evaluate the branching ratios for these decays within the framework of minimal gravity-, gauge- and anomaly-mediated SUSY breaking models, and also in SU(5) supergravity models with non-universal gaugino mass parameters at the GUT scale. We find that the contribution from gluino loops, which seems to have been left out in recent phenomenological analyses, is significant. We explore how the branching fraction varies in these models, emphasizing parameter regions consistent with other observations.Comment: Revised to accommodate minor changes in original text and update reference