Search

This document summarises the current theoretical and experimental status of the di-Higgs boson production searches, and of the direct and indirect constraints on the Higgs boson self-coupling, with the wish to serve as a useful guide for the next years. The document discusses the theoretical status, including state-of-the-art predictions for di-Higgs cross sections, developments on the effective field theory approach, and studies on specific new physics scenarios that can show up in the di-Higgs final state. The status of di-Higgs searches and the direct and indirect constraints on the Higgs self-coupling at the LHC are presented, with an overview of the relevant experimental techniques, and covering all the variety of relevant signatures. Finally, the capabilities of future colliders in determining the Higgs self-coupling are addressed, comparing the projected precision that can be obtained in such facilities. The work has started as the proceedings of the Di-Higgs workshop at Colliders, held at Fermilab from the 4th to the 9th of September 2018, but it went beyond the topics discussed at that workshop and included further developments., Comment: 279 pages, 136 figures, document produced partially as outcome of the conference Double Higgs Production at Colliders - Fermilab - Chicago (US) 4 - 9 September 2018. Submitted to Review in Physics. The editors can be contacted at the following address: hh-2018-paper-editors@cern.ch

A theoretical model involving phonon and lochon (local charged boson) mediated pairing of electrons in Pd(H/D)x is suggested to explain the possible observation of superconductivity in the range 51K < Tc < 295K (when x exceeds unity). In the combined mechanism the lochons have transient existence on (H+/D+) resulting in (H-/D-) species. The coupling parameter lambda_1 for lochon induced processes depend linearly on x. The model explains the observation of the enhancement of Tc for x varying from 0.6 to 1.6. While the experimental observations are of great importance, it is desirable that other experimental groups confirm the results., 7 pages, 2 figures

Models to account for the observed experimental results for low-energy nuclear reactions in palladium– deuteride systems are presented along with calculated results. The crucial idea is a mechanism of improved probability for the needed penetration of the Coulomb barrier for a D–D reaction. This facilitation occurs, in general, with the formation of $D^-$ ions at special frequency modes (e.g. via phonons) and, specifically for the laser-stimulated case, with utilization of enhanced optical potential at a selected interface. Both mechanisms may work individually, or together, to increase the probability of barrier penetration.

The statistics of the supersymmetry breaking scale in the string landscape has been extensively studied in the past finding either a power-law behaviour induced by uniform distributions of F-terms or a logarithmic distribution motivated by dynamical supersymmetry breaking. These studies focused mainly on type IIB flux compactifications but did not systematically incorporate the K\"ahler moduli. In this paper we point out that the inclusion of the K\"ahler moduli is crucial to understand the distribution of the supersymmetry breaking scale in the landscape since in general one obtains unstable vacua when the F-terms of the dilaton and the complex structure moduli are larger than the F-terms of the K\"ahler moduli. After taking K\"ahler moduli stabilisation into account, we find that the distribution of the gravitino mass and the soft terms is power-law only in KKLT and perturbatively stabilised vacua which therefore favour high scale supersymmetry. On the other hand, LVS vacua feature a logarithmic distribution of soft terms and thus a preference for lower scales of supersymmetry breaking. Whether the landscape of type IIB flux vacua predicts a logarithmic or power-law distribution of the supersymmetry breaking scale thus depends on the relative preponderance of LVS and KKLT vacua., Comment: 22 pages + appendices, 4 figures

String theory realisations of the QCD axion are often said to belong to the anthropic window where the decay constant is around the GUT scale and the initial misalignment angle has to be tuned close to zero. In this paper we revisit this statement by studying the statistics of axion physics in the string landscape. We take moduli stabilisation properly into account since the stabilisation of the saxions is crucial to determine the physical properties of the corresponding axionic partners. We focus on the model-independent case of closed string axions in type IIB flux compactifications and find that their decay constants and mass spectrum feature a logarithmic, instead of a power-law, distribution. In the regime where the effective field theory is under control, most of these closed string axions are ultra-light axion-like particles, while axions associated to blow-up modes can naturally play the role of the QCD axion. Hence, the number of type IIB flux vacua with a closed string QCD axion with an intermediate scale decay constant and a natural value of the misalignment angle is only logarithmically suppressed. In a recent paper we found that this correlates also with a logarithmic distribution of the supersymmetry breaking scale, providing the intriguing indication that most, if not all, of the phenomenologically interesting quantities in the string landscape might feature a logarithmic distribution., 30 pages + appendices, 2 figures