Department of Physics & Astronomy
University of New Mexico

Nuclear, Particle, Astroparticle and Cosmology (NUPAC) Seminars

An extension of the standard model in which parity is spontaneously broken

Presented by Kevin Cahill (UNM)

To be compatible with general relativity, every fundamental theory should be invariant under general coordinate transformations including spatial reflection. This paper describes a simple extension of the standard model in which the action is invariant under spatial reflection, and the vacuum spontaneously breaks parity by giving a mean value to a pseudoscalar field. This field and the scalar Higgs field make the gauge bosons, the known fermions, and a set of mirror fermions suitably massive while avoiding flavor-changing neutral currents. In this model, there is no strong-CP problem; there are no anomalies; fermion number (F = Q + L) is conserved; and heavy mirror fermions form heavy neutral mirror atoms, which are dark-matter candidates. In many grandly unified extensions of the model, nucleons slowly decay into pions, antileptons, and neutrinos in processes that conserve fermion number.

2:00 pm, Tuesday, December 12, 2017
PAIS-2540, PAIS

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