Continuum Top Partners

Speaker: 
Salvator Lombardo
Institution: 
Cornell
Date: 
Wednesday, October 18, 2017
Time: 
3:00 pm
Location: 
FRH 4135

Abstract:
The LHC has put the naturalness paradigm under pressure since one generally expects new colored resonances at the TeV scale to address the hierarchy problem. There exists another possibility, however. New dynamics responsible for furnishing a pseudo-goldstone composite Higgs may have a gapped continuum of colored excitations, in which case the top partners and vector resonances appear as branch cuts rather than poles in scattering amplitudes. The new colored states in this scenario cannot be described as Breit-Wigner resonances, drastically changing their LHC phenomenology. I will present a model in which a fermionic top partner continuum cuts off the quadratic divergence of the Higgs mass and show that some direct experimental constraints on such a scenario may be weakened relative to traditional composite Higgs models. 

Host: 
Sheldon Campbell
Felix Kling
Arvind Rajaraman
Yuri Shirman
Sebastian Trojanowski