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Supersymmetry models and phenomenology

Posted on:2008-10-15Degree:Ph.DType:Dissertation
University:The Johns Hopkins UniversityCandidate:Carpenter, Linda MFull Text:PDF
GTID:1440390005950380Subject:Physics
Abstract/Summary:
We present several models of supersymmetry breaking and explore their phenomenological consequences. First, we build models utilizing the supersymmetry breaking formalism of anomaly mediation. Our first model consists of the minimal supersymmetric standard model plus a singlet, anomaly-mediated soft masses and a Dirac mass which marries the bino to the singlet. The Dirac mass does not affect the so-called "UV insensitivity" of the other soft parameters to running or supersymmetric thresholds and thus flavor physics at intermediate scales would not reintroduce the flavor problem. The Dirac bino is integrated out at a few TeV and produces finite and positive contributions to all hyper-charged scalars at one loop thus producing positive squared slepton masses. Our second model approaches anomaly mediation from the point of view of the mu problem. We present a minimal method for generating a mu term while still generating a viable spectrum. We introduce a new operator involving a hidden sector U(1) gauge field which is then canceled against a Giudice-Masiero-like mu term. No new flavor violating operators are allowed. This procedure produces viable electroweak symmetry breaking in the Higgs sector. Only a single pair of new vector-like messenger fields is needed to correct the slepton masses by deflecting them from their anomaly mediated trajectories. Finally we attempt to solve the Higgs mass tuning problem in the MSSM; both electroweak precision measurements and simple supersymmetric extensions of the standard model prefer the mass of the Higgs boson to be around the Z mass. However, LEP II rules out a standard model-like Higgs lighter than 114.4 GeV. We show that supersymmetric models with R parity violation have a large range of parameter space in which the Higgs effectively decays to six jets (for Baryon number violation) or four jets plus taus and/or missing energy (for Lepton number violation). These decays are much more weakly constrained by current LEP analyses and could be probed by new exclusive channel analyses as well as a combined "model independent" Higgs search analysis by all experiments.
Keywords/Search Tags:Model, Supersymmetry, Higgs, New
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