We propose an alternative paradigm to the conjectured Miransky scaling potentially underlying the physics describing the transition from the conformally broken to the conformally restored phase when tuning certain parameters such as, for example, the number of flavors in gauge theories. According to the new paradigm the physical scale, and henceforth the massive spectrum of the theory jumps at the lower boundary of the conformal window. In particular we propose that a theory can suddenly jump from a Quantum Chromodynamics type spectrum, at the lower boundary of the conformal window, to a conformal one without particle interpretation. While the Miransky scaling supports a near-conformal dynamics of walking type the new jumping dynamics does not lead to near-conformal dynamics featuring walking properties. We will also discuss the impact of jumping dynamics on the construction of models of dynamical electroweak symmetry breaking.

PRACE is an international non-profit association with 24 European member countries. PRACE aims to enable high impact European scientific discovery and engineering research and development across all disciplines by granting access to world class computing and data management resources and services open to all European public research through a peer review process.

The FERMI system at CINECA is based on the new IBM BlueGene/Q architecture. FERMI is composed of 10.240 PowerPC A2 running at 1.6 GHz, each with 16 cores, for a total of 163.840 compute cores and a system peak performance of 2.1 PFlops. Each processor comes with 16 Gbyte of RAM (1 Gbyte per core). FERMI is equipped with a performant scratch storage system with a capacity of 2 Pbyte and a bandwidth in excess of 100 GByte/s.

Project Details

Title: Strong interactions beyond QCD

Project leader: Claudio Pica (CP3-Origins, IMADA, SDU).

Collaborators: Francesco Sannino (CP3-Origins), Luigi Del Debbio (University of Edinburgh UK), Biagio Lucini (Swansea University, UK), Antonio Rago (University of Plymouth, UK), Agostino Patella (CERN, Switzerland), and Stefan Sint (Trinity College Dublin, Ireland).

We have recently suggested [1, 2] that Inflation could have started in a local minimum of the Higgs potential at field values of about 10¹⁵−10¹⁷ GeV, which exists for a narrow band of values of the top quark and Higgs masses and thus gives rise to a prediction on the Higgs mass to be in the range 123-129 GeV, together with a prediction on the the top mass and the cosmological tensor-to-scalar ratio r. Inflation can be achieved provided there is an additional degree of freedom which allows the transition to a radiation era. In [1] we had proposed such field to be a Brans-Dicke scalar. Here we present an alternative possibility with an additional subdominant scalar very weakly coupled to the Higgs, realizing an (inverted) hybrid Inflation scenario. Interestingly, we show that such model has an additional constraint m_H < 125.3 ±3_th, where 3_th is the present theoretical uncertainty on the Standard Model RGEs. The tensor-to-scalar ratio has to be within the narrow range 10⁻⁴ <~r < 0.007, and values of the scalar spectral index compatible with the observed range can be obtained. Moreover, if we impose the model to have subplanckian field excursion, this selects a narrower range 10⁻⁴ <~r < 0.001 and an upper bound on the Higgs mass of about m_H < 124 ±3_th.

We derive new constraints on decaying Dark Matter from the gamma ray measurements of the isotropic residual background by FERMI and of the Fornax galaxy cluster by HESS. We find that they are among the most stringent ones for a large range of DM masses and a variety of decay modes, excluding half-lives up to ∼ 10^26 to few 10^27 seconds. In particular, they exclude the interpretation in terms of decaying DM of the e^± anomalies in PAMELA, FERMI and HESS, unless very conservative choices are adopted.
We also discuss future prospects for CTA.