Ian Low

TeV symmetry and the little hierarchy problem

Constraints from precision electroweak measurements reveal no evidence for new physics up to 5–7 TeV, whereas naturalness requires new particles at around 1 TeV to address the stability of the electroweak scale. We show that this ``little hierarchy problem can be cured by introducing a symmetry for new particles at the TeV scale. As an example, we construct a little Higgs model with this new symmetry, dubbed T-parity, which naturally solves the little hierarchy problem and, at the same time, stabilize the electroweak scale up to 10 TeV. The model has many important phenomenological consequences, including consistency with the precision data without any fine-tuning, a stable weakly-interacting particle as the dark matter candidate, as well as collider signals completely different from existing little Higgs models, but rather similar to the supersymmetric theories with conserved R-parity.

Little hierarchy, little Higgses, and a little symmetry

Little Higgs theories are an attempt to address the ``little hierarchy problem, i.e., the tension between the naturalness of the electroweak scale and the precision electroweak measurements showing no evidence for new physics up to 5 – 10 TeV. In little Higgs theories, the Higgs mass-squareds are protected at one-loop order from the quadratic divergences. This allows the cutoff of the theory to be raised up to ~ 10 TeV, beyond the scales probed by the current precision data. However, strong constraints can still arise from the contributions of the new TeV scale particles which cancel the one-loop quadratic divergences from the standard model fields, and hence re-introduces the fine-tuning problem. In this paper we show that a new symmetry, denoted as T-parity, under which all heavy gauge bosons and scalar triplets are odd, can remove all the tree-level contributions to the electroweak observables and therefore makes the little Higgs theories completely natural. The T-parity can be manifestly implemented in a majority of little Higgs models by following the most general construction of the low energy effective theory a la Callan, Coleman, Wess and Zumino. In particular, we discuss in detail how to implement the T-parity in the littlest Higgs model based on SU(5)/SO(5). The symmetry breaking scale f can be even lower than 500 GeV if the contributions from the higher dimensional operators due to the unknown UV physics at the cutoff are somewhat small. The existence of T-parity has drastic impacts on the phenomenology of the little Higgs theories. The T-odd particles need to be pair-produced and will cascade down to the lightest T-odd particle (LTP) which is stable. A neutral LTP gives rise to missing energy signals at the colliders which can mimic supersymmetry. It can also serve as a good dark matter candidate.

T parity and the littlest Higgs

We construct T-parity invariant extensions of the littlest Higgs model, in which only linear representations of the full symmetry group are employed, without recourse to the non-linear representations introduced by Coleman, Callan, Wess, and Zumino (CCWZ). These models are based on the symmetry breaking pattern SU(5)l × Hr/SO(5), where Hr can be SO(5) or other larger symmetry groups. The structure of the models in the SU(5)l sector is identical to the littlest Higgs model based on SU(5)/SO(5). Since the full symmetry group is realized linearly, these models can be thought of as possible UV extensions of the T-invariant model using non-linear representations via CCWZ, with whom they share similar low energy phenomenology. We also comment on how to avoid constraints from four-fermion operators on T-invariant models with or without CCWZ construction. The electroweak data therefore place a very weak bound on the symmetry breaking scale, f ≥ 450 GeV.

Implications of a Modified Higgs to Diphoton Decay Width

A bstractMotivated by recent results from Higgs searches at the Large Hadron Collider, we consider possibilities to enhance the diphoton decay width of the Higgs boson over the Standard Model expectation, without modifying either its production rate or the partial widths in the WW and ZZ channels. Studying effects of new charged scalars, fermions and vector bosons, we find that significant variations in the diphoton width may be possible if the new particles have light masses of the order of a few hundred GeV and sizeable couplings to the Higgs boson. Such couplings could arise naturally if there is large mass mixing between two charged particles that is induced by the Higgs vacuum expectation value. In addition, there is generically also a shift in the Zγ partial width, which in the case of new vector bosons tends to be of similar magnitude as the shift in the diphoton partial width, but smaller in other cases. Therefore simultaneous measurements in these two channels could reveal properties of new charged particles at the electroweak scale.

Little Higgs bosons from an antisymmetric condensate

We construct an SU(6)/Sp(6) non-linear sigma model in which the Higgses arise as pseudo-Goldstone bosons. There are two Higgs doublets whose masses have no one-loop quadratic sensitivity to the cutoff of the effective theory, which can be at around 10 TeV. The Higgs potential is generated by gauge and Yukawa interactions, and is distinctly different from that of the minimal supersymmetric standard model. At the TeV scale, the new bosonic degrees of freedom are a single neutral complex scalar and a second copy of SU(2)xU(1) gauge bosons. Additional vector-like pairs of colored fermions are also present.

Spontaneously broken spacetime symmetries and Goldstone's theorem

Goldstones theorem states that there is a massless mode for each broken symmetry generator. It has been known for a long time that the naive generalization of this counting fails to give the correct number of massless modes for spontaneously broken spacetime symmetries. We explain how to get the right count of massless modes in the general case, and discuss examples involving spontaneously broken Poincaré and conformal invariance.

Have we observed the Higgs boson (imposter)

We interpret the new particle at the Large Hadron Collider as a

Theoretical constraints on the Higgs effective couplings

CP

Dark matter from baryon asymmetry

-even scalar and investigate its electroweak quantum number. Assuming an unbroken custodial invariance as suggested by precision electroweak measurements, only four possibilities are allowed if the scalar decays to pairs of gauge bosons, as exemplified by a dilaton/radion, a nondilatonic electroweak singlet scalar, an electroweak doublet scalar, and electroweak triplet scalars. We show that current LHC data already strongly disfavor both the ``plain-vanilla dilatonic and nondilatonic singlet imposters. On the other hand, a generic Higgs doublet gives excellent fits to the measured event rates of the newly observed scalar resonance, while the Standard Model Higgs boson gives a slightly worse overall fit due to the lack of a signal in the

Top partners in little Higgs theories with T-parity

ensuremath{tau}ensuremath{tau}