Nuclear, Particle, Astroparticle and Cosmology (NUPAC) Seminars
The vacuum spontaneously breaks parity
Presented by Kevin Cahill, UNM
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.
2:00 pm, Tuesday, February 23, 2016
PAIS-3300, PAIS
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