Abstract:
The standard model (SM) of particle physics is a well studied theory, but there are hints that the SM is not the final story. What the full picture is, no one knows, but this thesis looks into three methods useful for exploring a few of the possibilities.
To begin I present a paper by Spencer Chang, Nirmal Raj, Chaowaroj Wanotayaroj, and me, that studies the Higgs boson. The scalar particle first seen in 2012 may be the vanilla SM version, but there is some evidence that its couplings are different than predicted. By means of increasing the Higgs' coupling to vector bosons and fermions, we can be more consistent with the data.
Next, in a paper by Spencer Chang, Gabriel Barello, and me, we elaborate on a tool created to study dark matter (DM) direct detection. The original work by Anand. {\em et al.} focused on elastic dark matter, whereas we extended this work to include the inelastic case, where different DM mass states enter and leave the collision. We also examine several direct detection experiments with our new framework to see if DAMA's modulation can be explained while avoiding the strong constraints imposed by the other experiments. We find that there are several operators that can do this.
Finally, in a paper by Spencer Chang, Gabriel Barello, and me, we study an interesting phenomenon know as kinetic mixing, where two gauge bosons can share interactions with particles even though these particles aren't charged under both gauge groups. This, in and of itself, is not new, but we discuss a different method of obtaining this mixing where instead of mixing between two Abelian groups one of the groups is Nonabelian. Using this we then see that there is an inherent mass scale in the mixing strength; something that is absent in the Abelian-Abelian case. Furthermore, if the Nonabelian symmetry is the SU$(2)_L$ of the SM then the mass scale of the physics responsible for the mixing is about 1 TeV, right around the sweet spot for detection at the LHC.
This dissertation includes previously published and unpublished co-authored material.