Talks

Neutrino physics entered a new era in the last decade. With the discovery of a non-vanishing neutrino rest mass in oscillation experiments a variety of new questions showed up in the context of nuclear and particle physics. One of the crucial questions is the determination of the absolute neutrino mass, which cannot be measured in oscillation experiments. One option is neutrino-less double beta decay, the simultaneous conversion of two neutrons into two protons emitting two electrons. This total lepton number violating process requires that neutrinos are their own antiparticles and is considered to be gold plated. Furthermore, the measured half-life is directly linked with the neutrino mass. Currently, half-life measurements beyond 1025 years are discussed. This requires a large amount of the isotope of interest and a reduction of disturbing background to the smallest possible level. Indeed it is a search for the needle in a haystack. After a general introduction into double beta decay and the related physics, the talk will focus on the status of the experiments GERDA, COBRA and SNO+.

The Large Hadron Collider has been operating for more than a year and delivering exciting results. It has already excluded large parts of the parameter space for supersymmetry. If the hints of a Higgs boson at 125 GeV hold up, the implications for supersymmetry are even more profound. I will explain some of the consequences, including the failure of large classes of models like general gauge mediation to account for such a heavy Higgs. I will also discuss some ideas about how to look for scalar top quarks, which must be present in the low-energy spectrum for supersymmetry to be natural.

The LHC is offering our first glimpses of physics at energies above a TeV, allowing us an unprecedented chance to search for very heavy new particles from electroweak compositeness, new gauge forces, extra dimensions, and supersymmetry.  Some of the most interesting signals involve decays into Standard Model particles that we are used to thinking of as "heavy":  W/Z bosons, top quarks, and perhaps Higgs bosons.  However, at genuinely TeV-scale energies, these SM particles with O(100 GeV) mass are produced with relativistic velocities.  Consequently, their own decay products are Lorentz-boosted into very collimated configurations, and can look uncomfortably similar to the jets of particles that are copiously produced by QCD at hadron colliders.  The past several years have witnessed a surge of ideas for how to uncover these challenging signals by carefully organizing the patterns of radiation observed in the LHC detectors, an approach called Jet Substructure.  I will discuss some of these recent ideas, and show a handful of important applications to searches for new physics.

We introduce an exactly solvable model to test various proposals for the imposition of the spin foam simplicity constraints. This model is a three-dimensional Holst-Plebanski action for the gauge group SO(4), in which the simplicity constraints mimic the situation of the four-dimensional theory. In particular, the canonical analysis reveals the presence of secondary second class constraints conjugated to the primary ones. We perform the spin foam quantization of the theory in the spirit of the BC and EPRL models, and give arguments for modifying the measure over the holonomies in order to account for the presence of the secondary second class constraints.