abstract: The work presented in this dissertation examines three different nonequilibrium particle physics processes that could play a role in answering the question “how was the particle content of today’s universe produced after the big bang?” Cosmic strings produced from spontaneous breaking of a hidden sector $U(1)_{\rm X}$ symmetry could couple to Standard Model fields through Higgs Portal or Kinetic Mixing operators and radiate particles that contribute to the diffuse gamma ray background. In this work we calculate the properties of these strings, including finding effective couplings between the strings and Standard Model fields. Explosive particle production after inflation, known as preheating, would have produced a stochastic background of gravitational waves (GW). This work shows how the presence of realistic additional fields and interactions can affect this prediction dramatically. Specifically, it considers the inflaton to be coupled to a light scalar field, and shows that even a very small quartic self-interaction term will reduce the amplitude of the gravitational wave spectrum. For self-coupling $\lambda_{\chi} \gtrsim g^2$, where $g^2$ is the inflaton-scalar coupling, the peak energy density goes as $\Omega_{\rm GW}^{(\lambda_{\chi})} / \Omega_{\rm GW}^{(\lambda_{\chi}=0)} \sim (g^2/\lambda_{\chi})^{2}$. Finally, leptonic charge-parity (CP) violation could be an important clue to understanding the origin of our universe's matter-antimatter asymmetry, and long-baseline neutrino oscillation experiments in the coming decade may uncover this. The CP violating effects of a possible fourth ``sterile" neutrino can interfere with the usual three neutrinos; this work shows how combinations of various measurements can help break those degeneracies. / Dissertation/Thesis / Doctoral Dissertation Physics 2016

abstract: The theory of quantum electrodynamics predicts that beta decay of the neutron into a proton, electron, and anti-neutrino should be accompanied by a continuous spectrum of photons. A recent experiment, RDK I, reported the first detection of radiative decay photons from neutron beta decay with a branching ratio of (3.09 ± 0.32) × 10-3 in the energy range of 15 keV to 340 keV. This was achieved by prompt coincident detection of an electron and photon, in delayed coincidence with a proton. The photons were detected by using a single bar of bismuth germanate scintillating crystal coupled to an avalanche photodiode. This thesis deals with the follow-up experiment, RDK II, to measure the branching ratio at the level of approximately 1% and the energy spectrum at the level of a few percent. The most significant improvement of RDK II is the use of a photon detector with about an order of magnitude greater solid angle coverage than RDK I. In addition, the detectable energy range has been extended down to approximately 250 eV and up to the endpoint energy of 782 keV. This dissertation presents an overview of the apparatus, development of a new data analysis technique for radiative decay, and results for the ratio of electron-proton-photon coincident Repg to electron-proton coincident Rep events. / Dissertation/Thesis / Ph.D. Physics 2012

Desenvolvemos uma nova técnica de equações de movimento para excitações nucleares partícula-partícula. Para isso, foi estendido o formalismo de duplos-comutadores de Rowe, relaxando-se a condição de aniquilação do estado-pai, violada no presente caso. As equações foram testadas para estados com senioridade nula de 2, 4 e 6 partículas sujeitas a uma força de emparelhamento, estando os resultados em excelente concordância com a solução exata. Foram também calculados, usando-se as novas equações e uma hamiltoniana realística, os estados de baixa energia com J = 0+, 2+, 4+, 6+ e 8+ para o 210,212,214Pb e 0+, 2+, 4+ e 6+ para o 206,204,202Pb. Tanto as energias de excitação como as taxas de transição (t,p) ou (p ,t) para esses estados concordam bem com as obtidas por um cálculo convencional de modelo de camadas de McGrory e Kuo e com os dados experimentais. O formalismo deverá ser útil para a análise de reações de transferência de dois núcleons. / A new equations-of-motion technique for particle-particle excitations in nuclei is developed. To this end Rowe\'s double-commutator formalism was extended, relaxing the condition of annihilation of the parent state, which is violated in the present case. The new equations were tested for seniority-zero states of 2, 4 and 6 particles interacting with a pairing force, and the results are in excellent agreement with the existing exact solution. Also computed, using the new equations and a realistic Hamiltonian, were the low energy states with J = 0+, 2+, 4+, 6+ and 8+ the case of 210,212,214 Pb and 0+, 2+, 4+ and 6+ in the case of 206, 204,202Pb. Both the excitation energies and the transition rates for the (t,p) or (p,t) \"reaction leading to those states are in as good an agreement with the experimental data as those obtained in a conventional shell-model calculation performed by McGrory and Kuo for some the above isotopes. The present formalism should be of interest for the analysis of two-nucleon transfer reactions.

In this thesis we examine the method of counting BB events produced in the BaBar experiment. The original method was proposed in 2000, but improvements to track reconstruction and our understanding of the detector since that date make it appropriate to revisit the B Counting method. We propose a new set of cuts designed to minimize the sensitivity to time-varying backgrounds. We find the new method counts BB events with an associated systematic uncertainty of ±0.6%. / Science, Faculty of / Physics and Astronomy, Department of / Graduate

In this dissertation, we explore the cosmological sensitivity of well-motivated extensions of the Standard Model (SM) of particles. We focus on two specific models, the vector portal and the Higgs portal, that can connect the SM to a dark sector of new hidden particles. We find that both portals have sensitivity in the ultra-weak coupling regime, where the relic abundance is set by the freeze-in mechanism. Provided that the mediators of the portal interactions decay into the SM, we derive the constraints on masses and couplings of such states from precision cosmology. As a primary source of constraints, we use Big Bang Nucleosynthesis (BBN), the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) and the diffuse X-ray background. For the Higgs portal scalar, we improve the relic abundance calculation in the literature and provide an estimate of thermal corrections to the freeze-in yield. We find that the cosmological bounds are relatively insensitive to improvements in the abundance accuracy, and a full finite-temperature calculation is not needed. We also investigate the BBN constraints for hypothetical long-lived metastable scalars particles $S$ that can be produced at the Large Hadron Collider from decays of the Higgs boson. We find that for viable branching ratios Br($h \to SS$), the early universe metastable abundance of $S$, regulated by its self-annihilation through the Higgs portal, is so large that the lifetime of $S$ is strongly constrained to $\tau_S < 0.1$~s to maintain the consistency of BBN predictions with observations. This provides a useful upper bound on the lifetimes of $S$ particles that a purposely-built detector, such as the one suggested in the MATHUSLA proposal, seek to discover. We also investigate the viability and detectability of freeze-in self-interacting fermionic dark matter communicating with the SM via a vector portal. We focus on the parameter where the $\chi \bar{\chi} \to A'A'$ is negligible, as required by a variety of indirect detection constraints. We find that planned upgrades to the direct detection experiments will be able to probe the region of parameter space that can alleviate small scale structure problems of dark matter via self-interactions for a dark fine structure constant as small as $\alpha_d =10^{-4}$. We forecast the sensitivity for Lux-ZEPLIN, XENONnT and PandaX-4T. / Graduate

This thesis contains studies of phenomenological aspects of new physics at hadron colliders, such as the Large Hadron Collider (LHC). After a general introduction in chapter 1, in chapter 2 we outline the main features of the Standard Model (SM) of particle physics and the theoretical motivations for going beyond it. We subsequently provide brief descriptions of a few popular models that aim to solve the issues that arise within the SM. In chapter 3 we describe the general Monte Carlo method for evaluating multidimensional integrals and show how it can be used to construct a class of computational tools called Monte Carlo event generators. We describe the main generic features of event generators and how these are implemented in the HERWIG++ event generator. By applying resummation techniques, we provide, in chapter 4, analytical calculations of two types of hadron collider observables. The first, global inclusive variables, are observables that make use of all measured particle momenta and can provide useful information on the scale of new physics. The second observable is the transverse energy of the QCD initial state radiation (ET ), associated with the either Drell-Yan gauge boson production or Higgs boson production. In both cases we provide comparisons to results obtained from Monte Carlo event generators. In chapter 5 we examine two well-motivated models for new physics: one of new heavy charged vector bosons (W prime), similar to the SM W gauge bosons, and a model motivated by strong dynamics electroweak symmetry breaking that contains new resonances, leptoquarks, that couple primarily to quarks and leptons of the third generation. In the prior model, we improve the current treatment of the W' by considering interference effects with the SM W and construct an event generator accurate to next-to-leading order which we use to conduct a phenomenological analysis. For the leptoquark model, starting from an effective Lagrangian for production and decay, we provide an implementation in the HERWIG++ event generator and use it to form a strategy for mass reconstruction. The thesis ends with some conclusions and suggestions for extensions of the work presented. Further details and useful formulæ are given in the appendices.

This dissertation is focused on three lines of work. In the first part, we consider aspects of holography and gauge/gravity duality in lower and higher dimensions. In particular, we study the duality for exact solutions localized on the Randal-Sundrum 2-branes. We also test if some holographic principles in general relativity can be generalized to include higher derivative theories of gravity; namely Lovelock gravity. In the second part we consider the role of pseudo Nambu-Goldstone bosons (pNGBs) in inflationary cosmology. Specifically, we construct an inflationary model using string theory axions, and use these pNGBs to produce the observed coherent magnetic field in the Universe. The third part of the thesis is devoted to the study of the phenomenology of emergent phenomena. We investigated whether one could test if diffeomorphism invariance, the sacred symmetry of general relativity, is emergent. We also construct a new minimal vectorial Standard Model, and argue that the absence of mirror particles predicted by this model can give us a hint about the fundamental nature of space.

Experiment E143 at SLAC performed deep-inelastic scattering measurements with polarized electrons incident on polarized protons and deuterons. The data for the beam energy of 29 GeV cover the kinematical range of $x\sb{\rm Bj}>0.03$ and $1

We demonstrate how the heavy baryon method, previously applied to chiral perturbation theory calculations involving the interactions of nucleons and pions, can be generalized to include interactions with the first nucleon resonance--$\Delta$(1232). The formalism is developed in terms of a small scale $\delta$ expansion, which refers to soft momenta, the pion mass and the nucleon-delta mass splitting $\Delta$ = $M\sb{\Delta} - M\sb{N}$. First applications of this chiral theory are presented, in particular the calculation of mass and wavefunction renormalization, threshold neutral pion photoproduction, and forward Compton scattering.

In experiment E154 at the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center the spin dependent structure function $g\sbsp{1}{n}(x,Q\sp2)$ of the neutron was measured by scattering longitudinally polarized 48.3 GeV electrons off a longitudinally polarized $\sp3$He target. The high beam energy allowed us to extend the kinematic coverage compared to the previous SLAC experiments to $0.014\leq x\leq0.7$ with an average $Q\sp2$ of 5 GeV$\sp2.$ We report the integral of the spin dependent structure function in the measured range to be $\int\sbsp{0.014}{0.7}dx\ g\sbsp{1}{n}(x,5\ {\rm GeV}\sp2)={-}0.036\pm0.004({\rm stat}.)\pm0.005({\rm syst}.).$ We observe relatively large values of $g\sbsp{1}{n}$ at low x that call into question the reliability of data extrapolation to $x\to0.$ Such divergent behavior disagrees with predictions of the conventional Regge theory, but is qualitatively explained by perturbative QCD. We perform a Next-to-Leading Order perturbative QCD analysis of the world data on the nucleon spin dependent structure functions $g\sbsp{1}{p}$ and $g\sbsp{1}{n}$ paying careful attention to the experimental and theoretical uncertainties. Using the parameterizations of the helicity-dependent parton distributions obtained in the analysis, we evolve the data to $Q\sp2$ = 5 GeV$\sp2,$ determine the first moments of the polarized structure functions of the proton and neutron, and find agreement with the Bjorken sum rule.