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A bstract Heavy particles with masses much bigger than the inflationary Hubble scale H * , can get non-adiabatically pair produced during inflation through their couplings to the inflaton. If such couplings give rise to time-dependent masses for the heavy particles, then following their production, the heavy particles modify the curvature perturbation around their locations in a time-dependent and scale non-invariant manner. This results into a non-trivial spatial profile of the curvature perturbation that is preserved on superhorizon scales and eventually generates localized hot or cold spots on the CMB. We explore this phenomenon by studying the inflationary production of heavy scalars and derive the final temperature profile of the spots on the CMB by taking into account the subhorizon evolution, focusing in particular on the parameter space where pairwise hot spots (PHS) arise. When the heavy scalar has an O (1) coupling to the inflaton, we show that for an idealized situation where the dominant background to the PHS signal comes from the standard CMB fluctuations themselves, a simple position space search based on applying a temperature cut, can be sensitive to heavy particle masses M 0 /H * ∼ O (100). The corresponding PHS signal also modifies the CMB power spectra and bispectra, although the corrections are below (outside) the sensitivity of current measurements (searches).

A bstract A novel mechanism, “catalyzed baryogenesis”, is proposed to explain the observed baryon asymmetry in our universe. In this mechanism, the motion of a ball-like catalyst provides the necessary out-of-equilibrium condition, its outer wall has CP-violating interactions with the Standard Model particles, and its interior has baryon number violating interactions. We use the electroweak-symmetric ball model as an example of such a catalyst. In this model, electroweak sphalerons inside the ball are active and convert baryons into leptons. The observed baryon number asymmetry can be produced for a light ball mass and a large ball radius. Due to direct detection constraints on relic balls, we consider a scenario in which the balls evaporate, leading to dark radiation at testable levels.

A bstract We initiate the study of a new class of beyond the Standard Model states that we call “Loryons.” They have the defining characteristic of being non-decoupling, in the sense that their physical mass is dominated by a contribution from the vacuum expectation value of the Higgs boson. The stakes are high: the discovery of a Loryon would tell us that electroweak symmetry must be non-linearly realized in the effective field theory of the Standard Model. Loryons have their masses bounded from above by perturbative unitarity considerations and thus define a finite parameter space for exploration. After providing a complete catalog of Loryon representations under mild assumptions, we turn to examining the constraints on the parameter space from Higgs couplings measurements, precision electroweak tests, and direct collider searches. We show that most fermionic candidates are already ruled out (with some notable exceptions), while much of the scalar Loryon parameter space is still wide open for discovery.

A bstract We study discovery prospects for a real triplet extension of the Standard Model scalar sector at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) and a possible future 100 TeV pp collider. We focus on the scenario in which the neutral triplet scalar is stable and contributes to the dark matter relic density. When produced in pp collisions, the charged triplet scalar decays to the neutral component plus a soft pion or soft lepton pair, yielding a disappearing charged track in the detector. We recast current 13 TeV LHC searches for disappearing tracks, and find that the LHC presently excludes a real triplet scalar lighter than 248 (275) GeV, for a mass splitting of 172 (160) MeV with ℒ = 36 fb − 1 . The reach can extend to 497 (520) GeV with the collection of 3000 fb − 1 . We extrapolate the 13 TeV analysis to a prospective 100 TeV pp collider, and find that a ∼ 3 TeV triplet scalar could be discoverable with ℒ = 30 ab − 1 , depending on the degree to which pile up effects are under control. We also investigate the dark matter candidate in our model and corresponding present and prospective constraints from dark matter direct detection. We find that currently XENON1T can exclude a real triplet dark matter lighter than ∼ 3 TeV for a Higgs portal coupling of order one or larger, and the future XENON20T will cover almost the entire dark matter viable parameter space except for vanishingly small portal coupling.

A bstract We investigate Planck scale boundary conditions on the Higgs sector of the standard model with a gauge singlet scalar dark matter. We will find that vanishing selfcoupling and Veltman condition at the Planck scale are realized with the 126 GeV Higgs mass and top pole mass, 172 GeV ≲ M t ≲ 173 . 5 GeV, where a correct abundance of scalar dark matter is obtained with mass of 300 GeV ≲ m S ≲ 1 TeV. It means that the Higgs potential is flat at the Planck scale, and this situation can not be realized in the standard model with the top pole mass.

A search for direct top squark pair production resulting in events with either a same-flavour opposite-sign dilepton pair with invariant mass compatible with a Z boson or a pair of jets compatible with a Standard Model (SM) Higgs boson (h) is presented. Requirements on the missing transverse momentum, together with additional selections on leptons, jets, jets identified as originating from b-quarks are imposed to target the other decay products of the top squark pair. The analysis is performed using proton-proton collision data at √s = 13 TeV collected with the ATLAS detector at the LHC in 2015–2016, corresponding to an integrated luminosity of 36.1 fb–1. No excess is observed in the data with respect to the SM predictions. The results are interpreted in two sets of models. In the first set, direct production of pairs of lighter top squarks (t~1) with long decay chains involving Z or Higgs bosons is considered. The second set includes direct pair production of the heavier top squark pairs (t~2) decaying via t~2 → Zt~1 or t~2 → ht~1. Here, the results exclude at 95% confidence level t~2 and t~1 masses up to about 800 GeV, extending the exclusion region of supersymmetric parameter space covered by previous LHC searches.