Naturally Light Scalars

I argue that in certain chiral gauge theories composite scalars associated with chiral symmetry breaking can be light (i.e. lighter than naive scaling from QCD would suggest) without any fine-tuning. These scalars will be even lighter in chiral gauge theories that produce chiral symmetry breaking without confinement. I construct a model which demonstrates this last possibility.Comment: 12 pages, LaTe

Glueballs and AdS/CFT

I review the calculation of the glueball spectrum in non-supersymmetric Yang-Mills theory (in 3 and 4 dimensions) using the conjectured duality between supergravity and large N gauge theories. The glueball masses are obtained by solving the supergravity wave equations in a black hole geometry. The masses obtained this way are in unexpectedly good agreement with the available lattice data, and are much better than strong-coupling expansion results. I also show how to use a modified version of the duality to calculate the glueball mass spectrum with some of the Kaluza-Klein states of the supergravity theory decoupled from the spectrum.Comment: 10 pages, 1 figure. Invited talk, "The Phenomenology of Large-Nc QCD", to be published in Proceedings of the Institute of Nuclear Theor

Glueball Mass Spectrum from Supergravity

We review the calculation of the spectrum of glueball masses in non-supersymmetric Yang-Mills theory using the conjectured duality between supergravity and large N gauge theories. The glueball masses are obtained by solving the supergravity wave equations in a black hole geometry. The glueball masses found this way are in unexpected agreement with the available lattice data. We also show how to use a modified version of the duality based on rotating branes to calculate the glueball mass spectrum with some of the Kaluza-Klein states of the supergravity theory decoupled from the spectrum.Comment: 7 pages, RevTeX. Based on two talks presented at DPF '99, UCLA, Los Angeles, CA, 5-9 January, 199

Negative contributions to S in an effective field theory

We show that an effective field theory that includes non-standard couplings between the electroweak gauge bosons and the top and bottom quarks may yield negative contributions to both the S and T oblique radiative electroweak parameters. We find that that such an effective field theory provides a better fit to data than the standard model (the chi-squared per degree of freedom is half as large). We examine in some detail an illustrative model where the exchange of heavy scalars produces the correct type of non-standard couplings.Comment: 12 pages, 1 fig., LaTeX, typos corrected, improved referencin

Marginal Breaking of Conformal SUSY QCD

We provide an example of a 4D theory that exhibits the Contino-Pomarol-Rattazzi mechanism, where breaking conformal symmetry by an almost marginal operator leads to a light pseudo-Goldstone boson, the dilaton, and a parametrically suppressed contribution to vacuum energy. We consider SUSY QCD at the edge of the conformal window and break conformal symmetry by weakly gauging a subgroup of the flavor symmetry. Using Seiberg duality we show that for a range of parameters the singlet meson in the dual theory reaches the unitarity bound, however, this theory does not have a stable vacuum. We stabilize the vacuum with soft breaking terms, compute the mass of the dilaton, and determine the range of parameters where the leading contribution to the dilaton mass is from the almost marginal coupling.Comment: 12 pages, no figure

Disguising the Oblique Parameters

We point out a set of operator identities that relate the operators corresponding to the oblique corrections to operators that modify fermion couplings to the gauge bosons as well as operators that modify triple gauge boson couplings. Such identities are simple consequences of the equations of motion. Therefore the contributions from new physics to the oblique parameters can be disguised as modifications of triple gauge boson couplings provided the fermion couplings to the gauge bosons are suitably modified by higher dimensional operators. Since the experimental constraints on triple gauge boson couplings are much weaker than the constraints on the oblique parameters this observation allows extra room for model building. We derive operator relations in effective theories of the Standard Model with the electroweak symmetry either linearly or nonlinearly realized and discuss applications of our results.Comment: 12 pages. v2: two references adde

The Minimal Model of a Diphoton Resonance: Production without Gluon Couplings

We consider the phenomenology of a resonance that couples to photons but not gluons, and estimate its production rate at the LHC from photon-photon fusion in elastic pp scattering using the effective photon and narrow width approximations. The rate is sensitive only to the mass, the spin, the total width of the resonance, and its branching fraction to photons. Production cross sections of 5-10 fb at 13 TeV can be easily accommodated for a 750 GeV resonance with partial photon width of 15 GeV. This provides the minimal explanation of the reported diphoton anomaly in the early LHC Run II data.Comment: 8 pages, 3 figures, missing figure supplied, typos corrected, references added, conclusions essentially unchange