Flavor constraints on scenarios with two or three heavy squark generations

We present the NLO SUSY-QCD corrections to the production of a pair of the lightest neutralinos plus one jet at the LHC, appearing as a monojet signature in combination with missing energy. We fully include all non-resonant diagrams, i.e. we do not assume that production and decay factorise. We derive a parameter point based on the p19MSSM which is compatible with current experimental bounds and show distributions based on missing transverse energy and jet observables. Our results are produced with the program GoSam Cullen et al. (Eur. Phys. J. C 72:1889, 2012) for automated one-loop calculations in combination with MadDipole/MadGraph for the real radiation part.     

Flavour issues for string-motivated heavy scalar spectra with a low gluino mass: the G 2-MSSM case

In recent years it has been learned that scalar superpartner masses and trilinear couplings should both generically be larger than about 20?TeV at the short-distance string scale if our world is described by a compactified string or M-theory with supersymmetry breaking and stabilized moduli (Acharya et?al. in arXiv:1006.3272 [hep-ph], 2010). Here we study implications of this, somewhat generally and also in detail for a particular realization (compactification of M-theory on a G ₂ manifold) where there is significant knowledge of the superpotential and gauge kinetic function, and a light gluino. In a certain sense this yields an ultraviolet completion of minimal flavour violation. Flavour violation stems from off-diagonal and non-universal diagonal elements of scalar mass matrices and trilinear couplings, and from renormalization group running. We also examine stability bounds on the scalar potential. While heavy scalars alone do not guarantee the absence of flavour problems, our studies show that models with heavy scalars and light gluinos can be free from such problems.     

Flavon inflation

We propose an entirely new class of particle physics models of inflation based on the phase transition associated with the spontaneous breaking of family symmetry responsible for the generation of the effective quark and lepton Yukawa couplings. We show that the Higgs fields responsible for the breaking of family symmetry, called flavons, are natural candidates for the inflaton field in new inflation, or the waterfall fields in hybrid inflation. This opens up a rich vein of possibilities for inflation, all linked to the physics of flavour, with interesting cosmological and phenomenological implications. Out of these, we discuss two examples which realise flavon inflation: a model of new inflation based on the discrete non-Abelian family symmetry group A₄$A_4$ or Δ₂₇${\mathrm{\Delta }}_{27}$, and a model of hybrid inflation embedded in an existing flavour model with a continuous SU(3)$\mathit{SU}(3)$ family symmetry. With the inflation scale and family symmetry breaking scale below the Grand Unification Theory (GUT) scale, these classes of models are free of the monopole (and similar) problems which are often associated with the GUT phase transition.