Professor Joseph Conlon

Abstract:

With sufficient data, Large Hadron Collider (LHC) experiments can constrain the selectron-smuon mass splitting through differences in the di-electron and di-muon edges from supersymmetry (SUSY) cascade decays. We study the sensitivity of the LHC to this mass splitting, which within mSUGRA may be constrained down to O(10^{-4}) for 30 fb^{-1} of integrated luminosity. Over substantial regions of SUSY breaking parameter space the fractional edge splitting can be significantly enhanced over the fractional mass splitting. Within models where the selectron and smuon are constrained to be universal at a high scale, edge splittings up to a few percent may be induced by renormalisation group effects and may be significantly discriminated from zero. The edge splitting provides important information about high-scale SUSY breaking terms and should be included in any fit of LHC data to high-scale models.

Abstract:

I show that the effective action of string compactifications has a structure that can naturally solve the supersymmetric flavour and CP problems. At leading order in the g_s and \alpha' expansions, the hidden sector factorises. The moduli space splits into two mirror parts that depend on Kahler and complex structure moduli. Holomorphy implies the flavour structure of the Yukawa couplings arises in only one part. In type IIA string theory flavour arises through the Kahler moduli sector and in type IIB flavour arises through the complex structure moduli sector. This factorisation gives a simple solution to the supersymmetric flavour and CP problems: flavour physics is generated in one sector while supersymmetry is broken in the mirror sector. This mechanism does not require the presence of gauge, gaugino or anomaly mediation and is explicitly realised by phenomenological models of IIB flux compactifications.