The Standard Model of particle physics describes all known elementary particles and their interactions. Despite its great experimental success, we know that the Standard Model is not a complete description of Nature and therefore new phenomena should be observed at higher energies. In the coming years the Large Hadron Collider will test the Standard Model by colliding protons with center of mass energies of up to 14 TeV providing some of the most stringent tests on the Standard Model.
Experimental searches for Dark Matter provide a complementary program to test physics at the weak scale. In the near future new experimental data coming from direct detection experiments, and from satellites and telescopes will drastically improve our sensitivity to weak scale dark matter. This could lead to the first direct observation of dark matter, and thus of physics beyond the Standard Model.
In this thesis I propose different extensions of the Standard Model and discuss their experimental consequences. I first discuss models for Axigluons, which are spin one particles in the adjoint representation of the SU(3) color gauge group. These models were motivated by the measurement of higher than predicted forward-backward asymmetry in top quark pair production at the Tevatron. I study different scenarios for Axigluon models that can explain the Tevatron result and explore their signatures at the Large Hadron Collider. Second I discuss the implications of ultraviolet scale invariance for the Standard Model, which has been advocated as a solution to the hierarchy problem. I show that in order to solve the hierarchy problem with scale invariance, new physics is required not far from the weak scale. In the last part of this thesis I propose a new model for dark matter, in which dark matter is charged under a hidden non-Abelian gauge group. This leads to modifications in the sensitivity of the usual experimental searches for dark matter in addition to distinct signatures in the Cosmic Microwave Background and in Large Scale Structure data.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:bu.edu/oai:open.bu.edu:2144/15721 |
| Date | 08 April 2016 |
| Creators | Marques Tavares, Gustavo |
| Source Sets | Boston University |
| Language | en_US |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Thesis/Dissertation |
| Rights | Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International, http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0 |
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