Paolo Lodone

On Partial Compositeness and the CP Asymmetry in Charm Decays

Recently, the LHCb and CDF collaborations reported the measure of an unexpectedly large direct CP asymmetry in D meson decays. In this paper we ask if new physics associated with Partial Compositeness could plausibly explain this result. We nd that Composite Higgs models with mass scale around 10 TeV can account for it, while marginally satisfying all other avor constraints in the quark sector. The minimal framework is however inadequate in the lepton sector due to the strong constraint from ! e . This tension can be eciently alleviated by realizing Partial Compositeness within Supersymmetry. The resulting models can saturate the CP asymmetry in D decays for superpartner masses close to the TeV scale and somewhat large A-terms. The supersymmetric realization of Partial Compositeness also oers a predictive and phenomenologically viable organizing principle for R-Parity violation, and may result in very distinctive signatures at hadron colliders. With or without Supersymmetry, the neutron EDM is expected to be around the present experimental sensitivity.

A non standard supersymmetric spectrum

Taking a bottom-up point of view and focussing on the lack of signals so far in the Higgs and in the flavour sectors, we argue in favour of giving consideration to supersymmetric extensions of the Standard Model where the lightest Higgs boson has a mass between 200 and 300 GeV and the first two generations of s-fermions are above 20TeV. After examining the simplest extensions of the Minimal Supersymmetric Standard Model that allow this in a natural way, we summarize the main consequences of this pattern of masses at the LHC and we analyze the consequences of a heavier than normal Higgs boson for Dark Matter.

A naturally light dilaton

A bstractGoldstone’s theorem does not apply straightforwardly to the case of spontaneously broken scale invariance. We elucidate under what conditions a light scalar degree of freedom, identifiable with the dilaton, can naturally arise. Our construction can be considered an explicit dynamical solution to the cosmological constant problem in the scalar version of gravity.

LHC bounds on large extra dimensions

We derive new dominant bounds on the coefficient of the effective operator generated by tree-level graviton exchange in large extra dimensions from pp → jj data at LHC: MT > 2.1 TeV (ATLAS after 3.1/pb of integrated luminosity), MT > 3.4 TeV (CMS after 36/pb), MT > 3.2 TeV (ATLAS after 36/pb). We clarify the role of on-shell graviton exchange and compare the full graviton amplitude to data, setting bounds on the fundamental quantum-gravity scale.

Minimal flavour violation with hierarchical squark masses

In a supersymmetric model with hierarchical squark masses we analyze a pattern of flavour symmetry breaking centered on the special role of the top Yukawa coupling and, by extension, of the full Yukawa couplings for the up-type quarks. For sufficiently heavy squarks of the first and second generation this leads to effective Minimal Flavour Violation of the Flavour Changing Neutral Current amplitudes. For this to happen we determine the bounds on the masses of the heavy squarks with QCD corrections taken into account, properly including previously neglected effects. We believe that the view presented in this paper altogether strengthens the case for hierarchical sfermions.

Naturalness bounds in extensions of the MSSM without a light Higgs boson

Adopting a bottom-up point of view, we make a comparative study of the simplest extensions of the MSSM with extra tree level contributions to the lightest Higgs boson mass. We show to what extent a relatively heavy Higgs boson, up to 200-350 GeV, can be compatible with data and naturalness. The price to pay is that the theory undergoes some change of regime at a relatively low scale. Bounds on these models come from electroweak precision tests and naturalness, which often requires the scale at which the soft terms are generated to be relatively low.

CP violation in supersymmetry with Effective Minimal Flavour Violation

We analyze CP violation in supersymmetry with Effective Minimal Flavour Violation, as recently proposed in [1]. Unlike the case of standard Minimal Flavour Violation, we show that all the phases allowed by the flavour symmetry can be sizable without violating existing Electric Dipole Moment constraints, thus solving the SUSY CP problem. The EDMs at one and two loops are precisely analyzed as well as their correlations with the expected CP asymmetries in B physics.

Radiation problem in transplanckian scattering

We investigate hard radiation emission in small-angle transplanckian scattering. We show how to reduce this problem to a quantum field theory computation in a classical background (gravitational shock wave). In momentum space, the formalism is similar to the flat-space light cone perturbation theory, with shock wave crossing vertices added. In the impact parameter representation, the radiating particle splits into a multi-particle virtual state, whose wavefunction is then multiplied by individual eikonal factors. As a phenomenological application, we study QCD radiation in transplanckian collisions of TeV-scale gravity models. We derive the distribution of initial state radiation gluons, and find a suppression at large transverse momenta with respect to the standard QCD result. This is due to rescattering events, in which the quark and the emitted gluon scatter coherently. Interestingly, the suppression factor depends on the number of extra dimensions and provides a new experimental handle to measure this number. We evaluate the leading-log corrections to partonic cross-sections due to the initial state radiation, and prove that they can be absorbed into the hadronic PDF. The factorization scale should then be chosen in agreement with an earlier proposal of Emparan, Masip, and Rattazzi. In the future, our methods can be applied to the gravitational radiation in transplanckian scattering, where they can go beyond the existing approaches limited to the soft radiation case.

Threshold corrections to hard supersymmetric relations

We compute the one-loop threshold corrections to hard supersymmetric relations involving gauge and gaugino couplings for the case of a Split-SUSY-like spectrum with moderate splitting. We show that these contributions are small, however in principle they will typically have to be taken into account if the heavy scalar sector is below 100 TeV and if one reaches, at future linear colliders, the precision that is necessary to perform this kind of measurements.

On the QCD corrections to ΔF=2 FCNC in the supersymmetric SM with hierarchical squark masses

Abstract In the context of the Supersymmetric Standard Model with hierarchical sfermion masses, we re-analyze the QCD corrections to Δ F = 2 effective Hamiltonian properly including effects which have been neglected so far. The point is that some Δ F = 2 diagrams, involving both the heavy and the light sparticles, exhibit a logarithmic dependence on the ratio between the two masses, signalling a sensitivity to all the momenta between the two scales. In order to properly deal with these terms one has to take into account the mixing between Δ F = 1 and Δ F = 2 operators. In typical situations this treatment can affect the result at the level of 30% or even more.