Model Building And Collider Physics Above The Weak Scale

Curtin, David

Model Building And Collider Physics Above The Weak Scale

Abstract

The Standard Model of particle physics, formulated in the 1970s, has been tremendously successful in explaining almost all experimental results from high-energy colliders. Nevertheless, there are both theoretical and experimental reasons to look for a more fundamental description of nature. With the Large Hadron Collider finally being online and delivering data, we might soon be in a position to fathom the solutions to some of the most fundamental questions in our field, first and foremost the nature of electroweak symmetry breaking and the solution to the hierarchy problem. The research presented in this thesis represents the author's contribution to the ongoing theoretical effort to develop theories beyond the Standard Model, as well as new methods of extracting information about the Lagrangian from experimental data. We start by developing a realistic quark sector for Higgsless Randall-Sundrum models, which show that this novel way of breaking the electroweak symmetry can be brought into agreement with highly constraining data on flavor violating interactions. We then move on to models involving supersymmetry, and construct a model of metastable SUSY-breaking that avoids several problems that traditionally plague models of Direct Gauge Mediation: low gaugino masses and loss of perturbative gauge coupling unification. Finally, we propose new experimental measurements which could provide a non-trivial consistency check that SUSY solves the hierarchy problem, and show for the first time how the family of MT 2 kinematic variables can be used in the presence of large combinatorics background.

Date Issued

2011-08-31

Keywords

high energy theory; high energy phenomenology; collider physics

Committee Chair

Csaki, Csaba

Committee Member

Grossman, Yuval
Wittich, Peter

Degree Discipline

Physics

Degree Name

Ph. D., Physics

Degree Level

Doctor of Philosophy

Types

dissertation or thesis