Research on Electroweak and Flavor Symmetry Breaking

[摘要] Abstract of Project Summary, as written in August 2012: The objective of this research is the primary one of the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN in Geneva: the discovery and study of the origin of electroweak symmetry breaking (EWSB). This is the mission of the LHC's two large general-purpose detectors, ATLAS and CMS. Lane's approach to this goal assumes that a new strong interaction at the electroweak energy scale of 100's of GeV, called ``technicolor'' (TC), is responsible for triggering EWSB. He is one of the developers of technicolor, particularly of its flavor-physics component, called extended technicolor (ETC). The TC/ETC theory of this physics provides not only the dynamics of EWSB, but also an understanding of the types (flavors) of quarks and leptons and of their masses and mixing. The main thrust of this research involves close collaboration with members of ATLAS and CMS to search for the signatures of TC/ETC that are most accessible experimentally. These are new, rather heavy, spin-one particles --- technivector bosons ($\tro$, $\tom$, $\ta$) --- readily produced at the LHC and decaying into electroweak bosons, $\gamma, W, Z$, and spin-zero bosons called technipions, $\tpi$. If these particles exist, they hold the key to understanding flavor physics. A very important recent development at the LHC is the discovery of a new 125-GeV boson decaying into $\gamma\gamma$, $ZZ$ and $WW$. This particle is widely suspected to be the long-sought Higgs boson, a basic component of the so-called standard model of EWSB. But, from a purely theoretical standpoint, this resolution to the origin of EWSB is very unsatisfactory. Moreover, there are interesting and possibly significant discrepancies of the data with this interpretation. Lane and collaborators are proposing that this boson is, in fact, a special kind of technipion. He is also working with ATLAS experimentalists to test this hypothesis. The LHC data to be collected and analyzed by ATLAS and CMS over the next year likely will determine whether the particle is a Higgs boson, a technipion, or something else entirely.

[发布日期] 2013-05-01

[学科分类] 物理（综合）

[关键词] Electroweak and flavor symmetry bbreaking