SuperWIMP Gravitino Dark Matter from Slepton and Sneutrino Decays

Dark matter may be composed of superWIMPs, superweakly-interacting massive particles produced in the late decays of other particles. We focus on the case of gravitinos produced in the late decays of sleptons or sneutrinos and assume they are produced in sufficient numbers to constitute all of non-baryonic dark matter. At leading order, these late decays are two-body and the accompanying energy is electromagnetic. For natural weak-scale parameters, these decays have been shown to satisfy bounds from Big Bang nucleosynthesis and the cosmic microwave background. However, sleptons and sneutrinos may also decay to three-body final states, producing hadronic energy, which is subject to even more stringent nucleosynthesis bounds. We determine the three-body branching fractions and the resulting hadronic energy release. We find that superWIMP gravitino dark matter is viable and determine the gravitino and slepton/sneutrino masses preferred by this solution to the dark matter problem. In passing, we note that hadronic constraints disfavor the possibility of superWIMPs produced by neutralino decays unless the neutralino is photino-like.Comment: 22 pages, updated figures and minor changes, version to appear in Phys. Rev.

Transport Properties in the "Strange Metal Phase" of High Tc Cuprates: Spin-Charge Gauge Theory Versus Experiments

The SU(2)xU(1) Chern-Simons spin-charge gauge approach developed earlier to describe the transport properties of the cuprate superconductors in the ``pseudogap'' regime, in particular, the metal-insulator crossover of the in-plane resistivity, is generalized to the ``strange metal'' phase at higher temperature/doping. The short-range antiferromagnetic order and the gauge field fluctuations, which were the key ingredients in the theory for the pseudogap phase, also play an important role in the present case. The main difference between these two phases is caused by the existence of an underlying statistical $\pi$-flux lattice for charge carriers in the former case, whereas the background flux is absent in the latter case. The Fermi surface then changes from small ``arcs'' in the pseudogap to a rather large closed line in the strange metal phase. As a consequence the celebrated linear in T dependence of the in-plane and out-of-plane resistivity is shown explicitly to recover. The doping concentration and temperature dependence of theoretically calculated in-plane and out-of-plane resistivity, spin-relaxation rate and AC conductivity are compared with experimental data, showing good agreement.Comment: 14 pages, 5 .eps figures, submitted to Phys. Rev. B, revised version submitted on 24 Oc

Towards Bose-Einstein Condensation of Electron Pairs: Role of Schwinger Bosons

It can be shown that the bosonic degree of freedom of the tightly bound on-site electron pairs could be separated as Schwinger bosons. This is implemented by projecting the whole Hilbert space into the Hilbert subspace spanned by states of two kinds of Schwinger bosons (to be called binon and vacanon) subject to a constraint that these two kinds of bosonic quasiparticles cannot occupy the same site. We argue that a binon is actually a kind of quantum fluctuations of electron pairs, and a vacanon corresponds to a vacant state. These two bosonic quasiparticles may be responsible for the Bose-Einstein condensation (BEC) of the system associated with electron pairs. These concepts are also applied to the attractive Hubbard model with strong coupling, showing that it is quite useful. The relevance of the present arguments to the existing theories associated with the BEC of electron pairs is briefly commented.Comment: Revtex, one figur

Fractional exclusion and braid statistics in one dimension: a study via dimensional reduction of Chern-Simons theory

The relation between braid and exclusion statistics is examined in one-dimensional systems, within the framework of Chern-Simons statistical transmutation in gauge invariant form with an appropriate dimensional reduction. If the matter action is anomalous, as for chiral fermions, a relation between braid and exclusion statistics can be established explicitly for both mutual and nonmutual cases. However, if it is not anomalous, the exclusion statistics of emergent low energy excitations is not necessarily connected to the braid statistics of the physical charged fields of the system. Finally, we also discuss the bosonization of one-dimensional anyonic systems through T-duality.Comment: 19 pages, fix typo

What Sets the Radial Locations of Warm Debris Disks?

The architectures of debris disks encode the history of planet formation in these systems. Studies of debris disks via their spectral energy distributions (SEDs) have found infrared excesses arising from cold dust, warm dust, or a combination of the two. The cold outer belts of many systems have been imaged, facilitating their study in great detail. Far less is known about the warm components, including the origin of the dust. The regularity of the disk temperatures indicates an underlying structure that may be linked to the water snow line. If the dust is generated from collisions in an exo-asteroid belt, the dust will likely trace the location of the water snow line in the primordial protoplanetary disk where planetesimal growth was enhanced. If instead the warm dust arises from the inward transport from a reservoir of icy material farther out in the system, the dust location is expected to be set by the current snow line. We analyze the SEDs of a large sample of debris disks with warm components. We find that warm components in single-component systems (those without detectable cold components) follow the primordial snow line rather than the current snow line, so they likely arise from exo-asteroid belts. While the locations of many warm components in two-component systems are also consistent with the primordial snow line, there is more diversity among these systems, suggesting additional effects play a role

Supergravity with a Gravitino LSP

We investigate supergravity models in which the lightest supersymmetric particle (LSP) is a stable gravitino. We assume that the next-lightest supersymmetric particle (NLSP) freezes out with its thermal relic density before decaying to the gravitino at time t ~ 10^4 s - 10^8 s. In contrast to studies that assume a fixed gravitino relic density, the thermal relic density assumption implies upper, not lower, bounds on superpartner masses, with important implications for particle colliders. We consider slepton, sneutrino, and neutralino NLSPs, and determine what superpartner masses are viable in all of these cases, applying CMB and electromagnetic and hadronic BBN constraints to the leading two- and three-body NLSP decays. Hadronic constraints have been neglected previously, but we find that they provide the most stringent constraints in much of the natural parameter space. We then discuss the collider phenomenology of supergravity with a gravitino LSP. We find that colliders may provide important insights to clarify BBN and the thermal history of the Universe below temperatures around 10 GeV and may even provide precise measurements of the gravitino's mass and couplings.Comment: 24 pages, updated figures and minor changes, version to appear in Phys.Rev.

Topological Gauge Structure and Phase Diagram for Weakly Doped Antiferromagnets

We show that the topological gauge structure in the phase string theory of the {\rm t-J} model gives rise to a global phase diagram of antiferromagnetic (AF) and superconducting (SC) phases in a weakly doped regime. Dual confinement and deconfinement of holons and spinons play essential roles here, with a quantum critical point at a doping concentration $x_c\simeq 0.043$. The complex experimental phase diagram at low doping is well described within such a framework.Comment: 4 pages, 2 figures, modified version, to appear in Phys. Rev. Let

A conditional quantum phase gate between two 3-state atoms

We propose a scheme for conditional quantum logic between two 3-state atoms that share a quantum data-bus such as a single mode optical field in cavity QED systems, or a collective vibrational state of trapped ions. Making use of quantum interference, our scheme achieves successful conditional phase evolution without any real transitions of atomic internal states or populating the quantum data-bus. In addition, it only requires common addressing of the two atoms by external laser fields.Comment: 8 fig