Suntracker balloon flights, flights 3026, 3028, 3029, and 3031

Suntracker balloon flight test instrumentatio

Scanning the Landscape of Flux Compactifications: Vacuum Structure and Soft Supersymmetry Breaking

We scan the landscape of flux compactifications for the Calabi-Yau manifold $\mathbb{P}^4_{[1,1,1,6,9]}$ with two K\" ahler moduli by varying the value of the flux superpotential $W_0$ over a large range of values. We do not include uplift terms. We find a rich phase structure of AdS and dS vacua. Starting with $W_0\sim 1$ we reproduce the exponentially large volume scenario, but as $W_0$ is reduced new classes of minima appear. One of them corresponds to the supersymmetric KKLT vacuum while the other is a new, deeper non-supersymmetric minimum. We study how the bare cosmological constant and the soft supersymmetry breaking parameters for matter on D7 branes depend on $W_0$, for these classes of minima. We discuss potential applications of our results.Comment: draft format remove

"Big" Divisor D3/D7 Swiss Cheese Phenomenology

We review progress made over the past couple of years in the field of Swiss Cheese Phenomenology involving a mobile space-time filling D3-brane and stack(s) of fluxed D7-branes wrapping the "big" (as opposed to the "small") divisor in (the orientifold of a) Swiss-Cheese Calabi-Yau. The topics reviewed include reconciliation of large volume cosmology and phenomenology, evaluation of soft supersymmetry breaking parameters, one-loop RG-flow equations' solutions for scalar masses, obtaining fermionic (possibly first two generations' quarks/leptons) mass scales in the O(MeV-GeV)-regime as well as (first two generations') neutrino masses (and their one-loop RG flow) of around an eV. The heavy sparticles and the light fermions indicate the possibility of "split SUSY" large volume scenario.Comment: Invited review for MPLA, 14 pages, LaTe

Quasirandomness in hypergraphs

An $n$-vertex graph $G$ of edge density $p$ is considered to be quasirandom if it shares several important properties with the random graph $G(n,p)$. A well-known theorem of Chung, Graham and Wilson states that many such `typical' properties are asymptotically equivalent and, thus, a graph $G$ possessing one such property automatically satisfies the others. In recent years, work in this area has focused on uncovering more quasirandom graph properties and on extending the known results to other discrete structures. In the context of hypergraphs, however, one may consider several different notions of quasirandomness. A complete description of these notions has been provided recently by Towsner, who proved several central equivalences using an analytic framework. We give short and purely combinatorial proofs of the main equivalences in Towsner's result.Comment: 19 page

Kahler Potentials of Chiral Matter Fields for Calabi-Yau String Compactifications

The Kahler potential is the least understood part of effective N=1 supersymmetric theories derived from string compactifications. Even at tree-level, the Kahler potential for the physical matter fields, as a function of the moduli fields, is unknown for generic Calabi-Yau compactifications and has only been computed for simple toroidal orientifolds. In this paper we describe how the modular dependence of matter metrics may be extracted in a perturbative expansion in the Kahler moduli. Scaling arguments, locality and knowledge of the structure of the physical Yukawa couplings are sufficient to find the relevant Kahler potential. Using these techniques we compute the `modular weights' for bifundamental matter on wrapped D7 branes for large-volume IIB Calabi-Yau flux compactifications. We also apply our techniques to the case of toroidal compactifications, obtaining results consistent with those present in the literature. Our techniques do not provide the complex structure moduli dependence of the Kahler potential, but are sufficient to extract relevant information about the canonically normalised matter fields and the soft supersymmetry breaking terms in gravity mediated scenarios.Comment: JHEP style, 24 pages, 4 figures. v2: New section and reference adde

Field Identifications for Interacting Bosonic Models in N=2 Superconformal Field Theory

We study a family of interacting bosonic representations of the N=2 superconformal algebra. These models can be tensored with a conjugate theory to give the free theory. We explain how to use free fields to study interacting fields and their dimensions, and how we may identify different free fields as representing the same interacting field. We show how a lattice of identifying fields may be built up and how every free field may be reduced to a standard form, thus permitting the resolution of the spectrum. We explain how to build the extended algebra and show that there are a finite number of primary fields for this algebra for any of the models. We illustrate this by studying an example

On the Effective Description of Large Volume Compactifications

We study the reliability of the Two-Step moduli stabilization in the type-IIB Large Volume Scenarios with matter and gauge interactions. The general analysis is based on a family of N=1 Supergravity models with a factorizable Kaehler invariant function, where the decoupling between two sets of fields without a mass hierarchy is easily understood. For the Large Volume Scenario particular analyses are performed for explicit models, one of such developed for the first time here, finding that the simplified version, where the Dilaton and Complex structure moduli are regarded as frozen by a previous stabilization, is a reliable supersymmetric description whenever the neglected fields stand at their leading F-flatness conditions and be neutral. The terms missed by the simplified approach are either suppressed by powers of the Calabi-Yau volume, or are higher order operators in the matter fields, and then irrelevant for the moduli stabilization rocedure. Although the power of the volume suppressing such corrections depends on the particular model, up to the mass level it is independent of the modular weight for the matter fields. This at least for the models studied here but we give arguments to expect the same in general. These claims are checked through numerical examples. We discuss how the factorizable models present a context where despite the lack of a hierarchy with the supersymmetry breaking scale, the effective theory still has a supersymmetric description. This can be understood from the fact that it is possible to find vanishing solution for the auxiliary components of the fields being integrated out, independently of the remaining dynamics. Our results settle down the question on the reliability of the way the Dilaton and Complex structure are treated in type-IIB compactifications with large compact manifold volumina.Comment: 23 pages + 2 appendices (38 pages total). v2: minor improvements, typos fixed. Version published in JHE

Finite reflection groups and graph norms

Given a graph H on vertex set {1, 2, · · · , n} and a function f : [0, 1]2 → R, define kfkH := Z Y ij∈E(H) f(xi , xj )dµ|V (H)| 1/|E(H)| , where µ is the Lebesgue measure on [0, 1]. We say that H is norming if k·kH is a semi-norm. A similar notion k·kr(H) is defined by kfkr(H) := k|f|kH and H is said to be weakly norming if k·kr(H) is a norm. Classical results show that weakly norming graphs are necessarily bipartite. In the other direction, Hatami showed that even cycles, complete bipartite graphs, and hypercubes are all weakly norming. We demonstrate that any graph whose edges percolate in an appropriate way under the action of a certain natural family of automorphisms is weakly norming. This result includes all previously known examples of weakly norming graphs, but also allows us to identify a much broader class arising from finite reflection groups. We include several applications of our results. In particular, we define and compare a number of generalisations of Gowers’ octahedral norms and we prove some new instances of Sidorenko’s conjectur

Suntracker balloon flights - 3033, 3034, 3035 and 3037 Final report

Preparations, field operations, and instrumentation for suntracker balloon flight

Sparticle Spectra and LHC Signatures for Large Volume String Compactifications

We study the supersymmetric particle spectra and LHC collider observables for the large-volume string models with a fundamental scale of 10^{11} GeV that arise in moduli-fixed string compactifications with branes and fluxes. The presence of magnetic fluxes on the brane world volume, required for chirality, perturb the soft terms away from those previously computed in the dilute-flux limit. We use the difference in high-scale gauge couplings to estimate the magnitude of this perturbation and study the potential effects of the magnetic fluxes by generating many random spectra with the soft terms perturbed around the dilute flux limit. Even with a 40% variation in the high-scale soft terms the low-energy spectra take a clear and predictive form. The resulting spectra are broadly similar to those arising on the SPS1a slope, but more degenerate. In their minimal version the models predict the ratios of gaugino masses to be M_1 : M_2 : M_3=(1.5 - 2) : 2 : 6, different to both mSUGRA and mirage mediation. Among the scalars, the squarks tend to be lighter and the sleptons heavier than for comparable mSUGRA models. We generate 10 fb^{-1} of sample LHC data for the random spectra in order to study the range of collider phenomenology that can occur. We perform a detailed mass reconstruction on one example large-volume string model spectrum. 100 fb^{-1} of integrated luminosity is sufficient to discriminate the model from mSUGRA and aspects of the sparticle spectrum can be accurately reconstructed.Comment: 42 pages, 21 figures. Added references and discussion for section 3. Slight changes in the tex