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- All Subjects: Particles (Nuclear physics)
- Creators: Easson, Damien
Description
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.
ContributorsHyde, Jeffrey Morgan (Author) / Vachaspati, Tanmay (Thesis advisor) / Easson, Damien (Committee member) / Belitsky, Andrei (Committee member) / Comfort, Joseph (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2016
Description
The muon problem of flavor physics presents a rich opportunity to study beyond standard model physics. The as yet undiscovered bound state (μ+μ-), called true muonium, presents a unique opportunity to investigate the muon problem. The near-future experimental searches for true muonium will produce it relativistically, preventing the easy application of non-relativistic quantum mechanics. In this thesis, quantum field theory methods based on light-front quantization are used to solve an effective Hamiltonian for true muonium in the Fock space of |μ+μ-> , |μ+μ-γ> , |e+e->, |e+e-γ>, |τ+τ-> , and |τ+τ-γ> . To facilitate these calculations a new parallel code, True Muonium Solver With Front-Form Techniques (TMSWIFT), has been developed. Using this code, numerical results for the wave functions, energy levels, and decay constants of true muonium have been obtained for a range of coupling constants α. Work is also presented for deriving the effective interaction arising from the |γγ sector’s inclusion into the model.
ContributorsLamm, Henry (Author) / Lebed, Richard F (Thesis advisor) / Belitsky, Andrei (Committee member) / Alarcon, Ricardo (Committee member) / Easson, Damien (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2016