Events Calendar
The vacuum spontaneously breaks parity
Tuesday February 23, 2016
| 2:00 pm
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Presenter: | Kevin Cahill, UNM |
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| Series: | Nuclear, Particle, Astroparticle and Cosmology (NUPAC) Seminars | |
| Abstract: | To be compatible with general relativity, every fundamental theory should be invariant under general coordinate trans- formations including spatial reflections. I will describe a simple model in which the vacuum-not the action-spontaneously breaks parity. In this model, there is a mirror fermion associated with every fermion, and a pseudoscalar field that assumes a mean value in the vacuum which breaks parity at low energies. This field and a scalar Higgs field make particles suitably massive while avoiding flavor-changing neutral currents. In this vector-like model, all gauge fields act on four-component Dirac fields, the vacuum spontaneously breaks parity, there is no strong-CP problem, there are no anomalies, the proton is stable, and heavy mirror fermions form heavy neutral mirror atoms that are dark-matter candidates. In most grandly unified extensions of this model, neutrons in nuclei slowly decay into three neutrinos. | |
| Host: | Rouzbeh Allahverdi | |
| Location: | PAIS-3300, PAIS | |
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