Toshifumi Yamada

Ion and electron heating characteristics of magnetic reconnection in tokamak plasma merging experiments

Recently, the TS-3 and TS-4 tokamak merging experiments revealed significant plasma heating during magnetic reconnection. A key question is how and where ions and electrons are heated during magnetic reconnection. Two-dimensional measurements of ion and electron temperatures and plasma flow made clear that electrons are heated inside the current sheet mainly by the Ohmic heating and ions are heated in the downstream areas mainly by the reconnection outflows. The outflow kinetic energy is thermalized by the fast shock formation and viscous damping. The magnetic reconnection converts the reconnecting magnetic field energy mostly to the ion thermal energy in the outflow region whose size is much larger than the current sheet size for electron heating. The ion heating energy is proportional to the square of the reconnection magnetic field component . This scaling of reconnection heating indicates the significant ion heating effect of magnetic reconnection, which leads to a new high-field reconnection heating experiment for fusion plasmas.

Intermittent magnetic reconnection in TS-3 merging experiment

Ejection of current sheet with plasma mass causes impulsive and intermittent magnetic reconnection in the TS-3 spherical tokamak (ST) merging experiment. Under high guide toroidal field, the sheet resistivity is almost classical due to the sheet thickness much longer than the ion gyroradius. Large inflow flux and low current-sheet resistivity result in flux and plasma pileup followed by rapid growth of the current sheet. When the pileup exceeds a critical limit, the sheet is ejected mechanically from the squeezed X-point area. The reconnection (outflow) speed is slow during the flux/plasma pileup and is fast during the ejection, suggesting that intermittent reconnection similar to the solar flare increases the averaged reconnection speed. These transient effects enable the merging tokamaks to have the fast reconnection as well as the high-power reconnection heating, even when their current-sheet resistivity is low under high guide field.

High power heating of magnetic reconnection in merging tokamak experimentsa)

This work was supported by a Grant-in-Aid for Scientific Research (A) No 22246119 and JSPS Core-to-Core program No 22001, the JSPS Institutional Program for Young Researcher Overseas Visits and NIFS Collaboration Research Programs (NIFS11KNWS001, NIFS12KLEH024, NIFS11KUTR060). This work was funded partly by the RCUK Energy Program under Grant No. EP/I501045 and the European Communities under the contract of CCFE.

Electroweak phase transition and Higgs boson couplings in the model based on supersymmetric strong dynamics

A bstractWe discuss a strongly-coupled extended Higgs sector with the 126 GeV Higgs boson, which is a low-energy effective theory of the supersymmetric SU(2)H gauge thoery that causes confinement. In this effective theory, we study the parameter region where electroweak phase transition is of strongly first order, as required for successful electroweak baryogenesis. In such a parameter region, the model has a Landau pole at the order of 10 TeV, which corresponds to the confinement scale of the SU(2)H gauge theory. We find that the large coupling constant which blows up at the Landau pole results in large non-decoupling loop effects on low-energy observables, such as the Higgs-photon-photon vertex and the triple Higgs boson vertex. As phenomenological consequences of electroweak baryogenesis in our model, the Higgs-to-diphoton branching ratio is about 20% smaller while the triple Higgs boson coupling is more than about 20% larger than the standard model predictions. Such deviations may be detectable in future collider experiments.

Simple fermionic dark matter models and Higgs boson couplings

A bstractWe consider a simple extension of the Standard Model (SM) that incorporates a Majorana fermion dark matter and a charged scalar particle with a coupling to the SM leptons through renormalizable terms. Another renormalizable term involving the charged scalar and the Higgs boson gives rise to interactions between the dark matter and SM quarks at the one-loop level, which induce the elastic scatterings between dark matter and nucleus. The same term also affects the effective coupling of the Higgs boson to diphoton through a one-loop diagram with the charged scalar. Therefore, our model predicts a correlation between the spin-independent cross section for dark matter-nucleus elastic scatterings and a new contribution to the effective Higgs boson coupling to diphoton. When the spin-dependent cross section is large enough to be tested in future direct dark matter detection experiments, the Higgs-diphoton decay rate shows a sizable deviation from the SM prediction. We also consider the case where the fermion dark matter is a Dirac particle. Most of discussions is similar to the Majorana case, but we find that the magnetic dipole moment of the Dirac fermion dark matter is loop-induced and this interaction dominates the spin-independent cross section for dark matter-nucleus elastic scatterings. We find that the resultant cross section is about an order of magnitude below the current experimental bound and hence can be tested in the near future.

Minimal flavor violation in the minimal U(1)B-L model and resonant leptogenesis

We investigate the resonant leptogenesis scenario in the minimally U(1)B−L extended standard model with minimal flavor violation. In our model, the U(1)B−L gauge symmetry is broken at the TeV scale and standard model singlet neutrinos gain Majorana masses of order TeV. In addition, we introduce a flavor symmetry on the singlet neutrinos at a scale higher than TeV. The flavor symmetry is explicitly broken by the neutrino Dirac Yukawa coupling, which induces splittings in the singlet neutrino Majorana masses at lower scales through renormalization group evolutions. We call this setup “minimal flavor violation”. The mass-splittings are proportional to the tiny Dirac Yukawa coupling, and hence they automatically enhance the CP asymmetry parameter necessary for the resonant leptogenesis mechanism. In this paper, we calculate the baryon number yield by solving the Boltzmann equations, including the effects of U(1)B−L gauge boson that also has TeV scale mass and causes washing-out of the singlet neutrinos in the course of thermal leptogenesis. The Dirac Yukawa coupling for neutrinos is fixed in terms of neutrino oscillation data and an arbitrary 3 × 3 complex-valued orthogonal matrix. We show that the right amount of baryon number asymmetry can be achieved through thermal leptogenesis in the context of the minimal flavor violation with singlet neutrinos and U(1)B−L gauge boson at the TeV scale. These particles can be discovered at the LHC in the near future.

A light Higgs scenario based on the TeV-scale supersymmetric strong dynamics

We consider a model based on the supersymmetric QCD theory with N_c=2 and N_f=3. The theory is strongly coupled at the infrared scale \Lambda_H. Its low energy effective theory below \Lambda_H is described by the supersymmetric standard model with the Higgs sector that contains four iso-spin doublets, two neutral iso-spin singlets and two charged iso-spin singlets. If \Lambda_H is at the multi-TeV to 10 TeV, coupling constants for the F-terms of these composite fields are relatively large at the electroweak scale. Nevertheless, the SM-like Higgs boson is predicted to be as light as 125 GeV because these F-terms contribute to the mass of the SM-like Higgs boson not at the tree level but at the one-loop level. A large non-decoupling effect due to these F-terms appears in the one-loop correction to the triple Higgs boson coupling, which amounts to a few tens percent. Such a non-decoupling property in the Higgs potential realizes the strong first order phase transition, which is required for a successful scenario of electroweak baryogenesis.

Multiple-point principle realized with strong dynamics

We present a novel extension of the Standard Model which fulfills the multiple-point principle without contradicting the Higgs particle mass measurement. In the model, the scalar potential has two minima where the scalar field has vacuum expectation values of 246 GeV and the Planck mass

Isospin-Violating Dark Matter at the LHC

\simeq 2.44\times 10^{18}

A 4 × U(1)PQ model for the lepton flavor structure and the strong CP problem

GeV, the latter of which is realized by considering a classically scale invariant setup and requiring that the scalar quartic coupling and its beta function vanish at the Planck scale. The Standard Model Higgs field is a mixture of an elementary scalar and composite scalars in a new strongly-coupled gauge theory, and the strong dynamics gives rise to the negative mass for the SM Higgs field, and at the same time, causes separation of the SM Higgs quartic coupling and the quartic coupling for the elementary scalar, which leads to the vanshing of the latter quartic coupling and its beta function at the Planck scale. The model predicts new scalar particles with about 300 GeV mass possessing electroweak charges and Yukawa-type couplings with Standard Model fermions, and a new light gauge boson that couples to Standard Model fermions.