Journal Club
Seminar Room
Thursday 22nd of February, 2018
On the (non-)uniqueness of the Levi-Civita solution in the Einstein-Hilbert-Palatini formalism
(Submitted on 28 Jun 2016 (v1), last revised 13 Mar 2017 (this version, v5))
We study the most general solution for affine connections that are compatible with the variational principle in the Palatini formalism for the Einstein-Hilbert action (with possible minimally coupled matter terms). We find that there is a family of solutions generalising the Levi-Civita connection, characterised by an arbitrary, non-dynamical vector field ${\cal A}_\mu$. We discuss the mathematical properties and the physical implications of this family and argue that, although there is a clear mathematical difference between these new Palatini connections and the Levi-Civita one, both unparametrised geodesics and the Einstein equation are shared by all of them. Moreover, the Palatini connections are characterised precisely by these two properties, as well as by other properties of its parallel transport. Based on this, we conclude that physical effects associated to the choice of one or the other will not be distinguishable, at least not at the level of solutions or test particle dynamics. We propose a geometrical interpretation for the existence and unobservability of the new solutions.
Presented by J.A. Orejuela and A. Jiménez-Cano
Lepton flavour violation in the MSSM: exact diagonalization vs mass expansion
(Submitted on 19 Feb 2018)
The forthcoming precision data on lepton flavour violating decays require precise and efficient calculations in New Physics models. In this article lepton flavour violating processes within the Minimal Supersymmetric Standard Model (MSSM) are calculated using the method based on the Flavour Expansion Theorem, a recently developed technique performing a purely algebraic mass-insertion expansion of the amplitudes. The expansion in both flavour-violating and flavour-conserving off-diagonal terms of sfermion and supersymmetric fermion mass matrices is considered. In this way the relevant processes are expressed directly in terms of the parameters of the MSSM Lagrangian. We also study the decoupling properties of the amplitudes. The results are compared to the corresponding calculations in the mass eigenbasis (i.e. using the exact diagonalization of the mass matrices). Using these methods, we consider the following processes: $\ell \to \ell' \gamma$, $\ell \to 3 \ell'$, $\ell \to 2\ell'\ell''$, $h \to \ell\ell'$ as well as $\mu \to e$ conversion in nuclei. In the numerical analysis we update the bounds on the flavour changing parameters of the MSSM and examine the sensitivity to the forthcoming experimental results. We find that flavour violating muon decays provide the most stringent bounds on supersymmetric effects and will continue to do so in the future. Radiative $\ell\to\ell^\prime\gamma$ decays and leptonic three-body decays $\ell\to 3\ell^\prime$ show an interesting complementarity in eliminating "blind spots" in the parameter space. In our analysis we also include the effects of non-holomorphic $A$-terms which are important for the study of LFV Higgs decays.
Presented by J. Santiago
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