Hyun Min Lee

We consider the cosmological relaxation of the Higgs mass and the cosmological constant due to the four-form fluxes in four dimensions. We present a general class of models with a singlet scalar field containing four-form couplings where the Higgs mass is relaxed to a right value and the Universe reheats to a sufficiently high reheating temperature after the last membrane nucleation. We also discuss some of interesting features in the cases of singlet scalar fields with non-minimal or minimal couplings to gravity and show how the new scalar fields can play a role for dark matter production.

We compute the gamma-ray output of axion-mediated dark matter and derive the corresponding constraints set by recent data. In such scenarios the dark matter candidate is a Dirac fermion that pair-annihilates into axions and/or scalars. Provided that the axion decays (at least partly) into photons, these models naturally give rise to a box-shaped gamma-ray spectrum that may present two distinct phenomenological behaviours: a narrow box, resembling a line at half the dark matter mass, or a wide box, spanning an extensive energy range up to the dark matter mass. Remarkably, we find that in both cases a sizable gamma-ray flux is predicted for a thermal relic without fine-tuning the model parameters nor invoking boost factors. This large output is in line with recent Fermi-LAT observations towards the galactic centre region and is on the verge of being excluded. We then make use of the Fermi-LAT and H.E.S.S. data to derive robust, model-independent upper limits on the dark matter annihilation cross section for the narrow and wide box scenarios. H.E.S.S. constraints, in particular, turn out to match the ones from Fermi-LAT at hundreds of GeV and extend to multi-TeV masses. Future Čerenkov telescopes will likely probe gamma-ray boxes from thermal dark matter relics in the whole multi-TeV range, a region hardly accessible to direct detection, collider searches and other indirect detection strategies.

We consider axion-mediated dark matter models motivated by Fermi gamma ray line at 130 GeV, where an axion-like scalar couples to a singlet Dirac fermion dark matter (DM) so its anomaly interactions with electroweak gauge bosons allow the DM to annihilate into monochromatic photon(s). In these models, extra vector-like leptons generate the necessary anomaly interactions for the axion and can also modify the Higgs-to-diphoton rate by their Yukawa couplings to the SM Higgs boson. We can distinguish models by the branching fraction of the DM annihilation into a photon pair, favoring the model with a triplet fermion. From the condition that the lighter charged extra lepton must be heavier than dark matter for no tree-level DM annihilations, we also show that the ratio of Higgs-to-diphoton rate to the SM value is constrained by vacuum stability to 1.4 (1.5) for the cutoff scale of 10 (1) TeV.

We show how a heavy scalar singlet with a large vacuum expectation value can evade the potential instability of the Standard Model electroweak vacuum. The quartic interaction between the heavy scalar singlet and the Higgs doublet leads to a positive tree-level threshold correction for the Higgs quartic coupling, which is very effective in stabilizing the potential. We provide examples, such as the see-saw, invisible axion and unitarized Higgs inflation, where the proposed mechanism is automatically implemented in well-defined ranges of Higgs masses.

We compare the experimental prospects of direct stop and sbottom pair production searches at the LHC. Such searches for stops are of great interest as they directly probe for states that are motivated by the SUSY solution to the hierarchy problem of the Higgs mass parameter — leading to a “Natural” SUSY spectrum. Noting that sbottom searches are less experimentally challenging and scale up in reach directly with the improvement on b-tagging algorithms, we discuss the interplay of small TeV scale custodial symmetry violation with sbottom direct pair production searches as a path to obtaining strong sub-TeV constraints on stops in a natural SUSY scenario. We argue that if a weak scale natural SUSY spectrum does not exist within the reach of LHC, then hopes for such a spectrum for large regions of parameter space should “sbottom out”. Conversely, the same arguments make clear that a discovery of such a spectrum is likely to proceed in a “sbottom up” manner.

We consider the Higgs inflation in the extension of the Standard Model with two Higgs doublets coupled to gravity non-minimally. In the presence of an approximate global U(1) symmetry in the Higgs sector, both radial and angular modes of neutral Higgs bosons drive inflation where large non-Gaussianity is possible from appropriate initial conditions on the angular mode. We also discuss the case with single-field inflation for which the U(1) symmetry is broken to aZ₂subgroup. We show that inflationary constraints, perturbativity and stability conditions restrict the parameter space of the Higgs quartic couplings at low energy in both multi- and single-field cases. Focusing on the inert doublet models whereZ₂symmetry remains unbroken at low energy, we show that the extra neutral Higgs boson can be a dark matter candidate consistent with the inflationary constraints. The doublet dark matter is always heavy in multi-field inflation while it can be light due to the suppression of the co-annihilation in single-field inflation. The implication of the extra quartic couplings on the vacuum stability bound is also discussed in the light of the recent LHC limits on the Higgs mass.