Giovanni Villadoro

The lack of evidence for new physics beyond the standard model at the LHC points to a paucity of new particles near the weak scale. This suggests that the weak scale is tuned and that supersymmetry, if present at all, is realized at higher energies. The measured Higgs mass constrains the scalar sparticles to be below 10⁵TeV, while gauge coupling unification favors Higgsinos below 100 TeV. Nevertheless, in many models gaugino masses are suppressed and remain within reach of the LHC. Tuning the weak scale and the renormalization group evolution of the scalar masses constrain Split model building. Due to the small gaugino masses, either the squarks or the up-higgs often run tachyonic; in the latter case, successful electroweak breaking requires heavy higgsinos near the scalar sparticles. We discuss the consequences of tuning the weak scale and the phenomenology of several models of Split supersymmetry including anomaly mediation, U(1)_B−Lmediation, and Split gauge mediation.

Light states associated with the hierarchy problem affect the Higgs LHC production and decays. We illustrate this within the MSSM and two simple extensions applying the latest bounds from LHC Higgs searches. Large deviations in the Higgs properties are expected in a natural SUSY spectrum. The discovery of a non-Standard-Model Higgs may signal the presence of light stops accessible at the LHC. Conversely, the more the Higgs is Standard-Model-like, the more tuned the theory becomes. Taking the ratio of different Higgs decay channels at the LHC cancels the leading QCD uncertainties and potentially improves the accuracy in Higgs coupling measurements to the percent level. This may lead to the possibility of doing precision Higgs physics at the LHC. Finally, we entertain the possibility that the ATLAS excess around 125 GeV persists with a Higgs production cross-section that is enhanced compared to the SM. This increase can only be accommodated in extensions of the MSSM and it may suggest that stops lie below 400 GeV, likely within reach of next year’s LHC run.

We study the possibility of gauging the Standard Model flavor group. Anomaly cancellation leads to the addition of fermions whose mass is inversely proportional to the known fermion masses. In this case all flavor violating effects turn out to be controlled roughly by the Standard Model Yukawa, suppressing transitions for the light generations. Due to the inverted hierarchy the scale of new gauge flavor bosons could be as low as the electroweak scale without violating any existing bound but accessible at the Tevatron and the LHC. The mechanism of flavor protection potentially provides an alternative to Minimal Flavor Violation, with flavor violating effects suppressed by hierarchy of scales rather than couplings.

We consider non-universal 'minimal' Z' models, whose additional U(1) charge is a non-anomalous linear combination of the weak hypercharge Y, the baryon number B and the partial lepton numbers (L_e, L_mu, L_tau), with no exotic fermions beyond three standard families with right-handed neutrinos. We show that the observed pattern of neutrino masses and mixing can be fully reproduced by a gauge-invariant renormalizable Lagrangian, and flavor-changing neutral currents in the charged lepton sector are suppressed by a GIM mechanism. We then discuss the phenomenology of some benchmark models. The electrophilic B-3L_e model is significantly constrained by electroweak precision tests, but still allows to fit the hint of an excess observed by CDF in dielectrons but not in dimuons. The muonphilic B-3L_mu model is very mildly constrained by electroweak precision tests, so that even the very early phase of the LHC can explore significant areas of parameter space. We also discuss the hadrophobic L_mu-L_tau model, which has recently attracted interest in connection with some puzzling features of cosmic ray spectra.

We establish the precise correspondence between Type-IIA flux compactifications preserving an exact or spontaneously broken N=4 supersymmetry in four dimensions, and gaugings of their effective N=4 supergravities. We exhibit the explicit map between fluxes and Bianchi identities in the higher-dimensional theory and generalized structure constants and Jacobi identities in the reduced theory, also detailing the origin of gauge groups embedded at angles in the duality group. We present AdS4 solutions of the massive Type-IIA theory with spontaneous breaking to N=1, at small string coupling and large volume, and discuss their dual CFT3.