
JOINT PARTICLE SEMINAR
NOTE SPECIAL LOCATION
Date: Wednesday,
16 March 2005
Time:
3:00 p.m.
Place: 1114 Natural Sciences 1
Speaker:
Hsin-Chia Cheng, Harvard
Title:
Little Hierarchy Problem and Little Higgs Theories
Abstract:
Naturalness of the electroweak symmetry breaking scale requires new
physics at around 1 TeV. On the other hand, constraints from
precision electroweak measurements reveal no evidence for new physics
up to 5 - 10 TeV, which creates a tension with the naturalness
requirement, known as the "little hierarchy problem." Little Higgs
theories are an attempt to address this problem. In little Higgs
theories, the Higgs doublet(s) are pseudo-Nambu-Goldstone bosons with
the special property such that the cutoff of the theory can be raised
up to 10 TeV, beyond the scales probed by the current electroweak
precision data. However, new TeV scale particles that are required to
cancel the one-loop quadratic divergence can also give large
contributions to the electroweak observables and re-introduce the
fine-tuning problem. I will discuss a general class of the little
Higgs theories with a new symmetry, called T-parity, which eliminates
all the tree-level contributions to the electroweak observables and
hence makes these theories natural. The existence of T-parity has
drastic impacts on phenomenology of little Higgs theories. The T-odd
particles need to be pair-produced and will cascade down to the
lightest T-odd particle which is stable. A neutral lightest T-odd
particle gives rise to missing energy signals at the colliders that
can mimic supersymmetry. It also serves as a good dark matter
candidate.
Host: J. Feng