Raising the Higgs mass with Yukawa couplings for isotriplets in vector-like extensions of minimal supersymmetry

Extra vector-like matter with both electroweak-singlet masses and large Yukawa couplings can significantly raise the lightest Higgs boson mass in supersymmetry through radiative corrections. I consider models of this type that involve a large Yukawa coupling between weak isotriplet and isodoublet chiral supermultiplets. The particle content can be completed to provide perturbative gauge coupling unification, in several different ways. The impact on precision electroweak observables is shown to be acceptably small, even if the new particles are as light as the current experimental bounds of order 100 GeV. I study the corrections to the lightest Higgs boson mass, and discuss the general features of the collider signatures for the new fermions in these models.Comment: 30 page

Renormalization of the EWCL and its Application to LEP2

We perform a systematic one-loop renormalization on the electroweak chiral Lagrangian (EWCL) up to $O(p^4)$ operators and construct the renormalization group equations (RGE) for the anomalous couplings. We examine the impact of the triple gauge coupling (TGC) measurement from LEP2 to the uncertainty of the $S-T$ parameter at the $\Lambda=1 TeV$, and find that the uncertainty in the TGC measurements can shift $S(\Lambda)$ at least $3.3 \sigma$.Comment: 4 pages, 1 eps figure, uses ws-ijmpa.cls. Paralell talk given at "International Conference on QCD and hadronic Physics", Beijing, China, 16-20 June, 200

Searches for Long-lived Particles at the Tevatron Collider

Several searches for long-lived particles have been performed using data from p-pbar collisions from Run II at the Tevatron. In most cases, new analysis techniques have been developed to carry out each search and/or estimate the backgrounds. These searches expand the discovery potential of the CDF and D0 experiments to new physics that may have been missed by traditional search techniques. This review discusses searches for (1) neutral, long-lived particles decaying to muons, (2) massive, neutral, long-lived particles decaying to a photon and missing energy, (3) stopped gluinos, and (4) charged massive stable particles. It summarizes some of the theoretical and experimental motivations for such searches.Comment: submitted to Mod. Phys. Lett.

Constraining Light Colored Particles with Event Shapes

Using recently developed techniques for computing event shapes with Soft-Collinear Effective Theory, LEP event shape data is used to derive strong model-independent bounds on new colored particles. In the effective field theory computation, colored particles contribute in loops not only to the running of alpha_s but also to the running of hard, jet and soft functions. Moreover, the differential distribution in the effective theory explicitly probes many energy scales, so event shapes have strong sensitivity to new particle thresholds. Using thrust data from ALEPH and OPAL, colored adjoint fermions (such as a gluino) below 51.0 GeV are ruled out to 95% confidence level. This is nearly an order-of-magnitude improvement over the previous model-independent bound of 6.3 GeV.Comment: 4 pages, 2 figure

Phenomenology of non-universal gaugino masses in supersymmetric grand unified theories

Grand unified theories can lead to non-universal boundary conditions for the gaugino masses at the unification scale. We consider the implications of such non-universal boundary conditions for the composition of the lightest neutralino as well as for the upper bound on its mass in the simplest supersymmetric grand unified theory based on the SU(5) gauge group. We derive sum rules for neutralino and chargino masses in different representations of SU(5) which lead to different non-universal boundary conditions for the gaugino masses at the unification scale. We also consider the phenomenological implications of the non-universal gaugino masses arising from a grand unified theory in the context of Large Hadron Collider. In particular we investigate the detection of heavy neutral Higgs bosons $H^0, A^0$ from $H^0, A^0 \to \tilde{\chi}_2^0 \tilde{\chi}_2^0 \to 4l$, and study the possibilities of detecting the neutral Higgs bosons in cascade decays, including the decays $\tilde{\chi}_i^0 \to h^0 (H^0, A^0) \tilde{\chi}_1^0 \to b\bar{b} \tilde{\chi}_1^0$.Comment: 24 pages, uses psrfrag. Typo in Eq. (15) corrected. Added more detailed discussion about non-universality in SUSY SU(5). Parameter space and RGE loop level indicated more clearly. Added a few references. Version to be published in Phys. Rev.

Model-Independent Jets plus Missing Energy Searches

We present a proposal for performing model-independent jets plus missing energy searches. Currently, these searches are optimized for mSUGRA and are consequently not sensitive to all kinematically-accessible regions of parameter space. We show that the reach of these searches can be broadened by setting limits on the differential cross section as a function of the total visible energy and the missing energy. These measurements only require knowledge of the relevant Standard Model backgrounds and can be subsequently used to limit any theoretical model of new physics. We apply this approach to an example where gluinos are pair-produced and decay to the LSP through a single-step cascade, and show how sensitivity to different gluino masses is altered by the presence of the decay chain. The analysis is closely based upon the current searches done at the Tevatron and our proposal requires only small modifications to the existing techniques. We find that within the MSSM, the gluino can be as light as 125 GeV. The same techniques are applicable to jets and missing energy searches at the Large Hadron Collider.Comment: 22 pages, 6 figures, 3 tables, typos correcte

Stau as the Lightest Supersymmetric Particle in R-Parity Violating SUSY Models: Discovery Potential with Early LHC Data

We investigate the discovery potential of the LHC experiments for R-parity violating supersymmetric models with a stau as the lightest supersymmetric particle (LSP) in the framework of minimal supergravity. We classify the final states according to their phenomenology for different R-parity violating decays of the LSP. We then develop event selection cuts for a specific benchmark scenario with promising signatures for the first beyond the Standard Model discoveries at the LHC. For the first time in this model, we perform a detailed signal over background analysis. We use fast detector simulations to estimate the discovery significance taking the most important Standard Model backgrounds into account. Assuming an integrated luminosity of 1 inverse femtobarn at a center-of-mass energy of 7 TeV, we perform scans in the parameter space around the benchmark scenario we consider. We then study the feasibility to estimate the mass of the stau-LSP. We briefly discuss difficulties, which arise in the identification of hadronic tau decays due to small tau momenta and large particle multiplicities in our scenarios.Comment: 26 pages, 18 figures, LaTeX; minor changes, final version published in PR