ENP

New Physics Searches

The research activity of ENP in Tor Vergata concerns indirect searches for New Physics in quark flavour changing processes and in effective Higgs boson couplings as well as the investigation of new ideas about the origin of particle masses and fermion flavour mixing. Indeed within the Standard Model (SM) of Particle Physics all the mass and flavour mixing parameters describing its peculiar flavour structure are not predicted, rather just fit to the experimental data. This, together with the naturalness of the electroweak mass scale, represents the most puzzling problem left open by the SM as a basic renormalizable theory.

The group is recently studying a new mechanism for non-perturbative generation of elementary particle masses due to a dynamical phenomenon of spontaneous chiral symmetry breaking that is expected to take place in models with non-Abelian gauge fields, fermions and scalars as a consequence of the presence of critical Wilson-like terms in the action. A pioneering numerical study of the simplest (d=4) QFT model of this kind is in progress in order to demonstrate the mechanism. More realistic models of this type are conceivable, where owing to the same non-perturbative mechanism the EW mass scale arises in a natural way and fermion masses get generated with a hierarchy similar to the one that is observed in Nature.

Staff members involved in this research: G.M. de Divitiis, R. Frezzotti – in collaboration with prof. G.C. Rossi, dr. P. Dimopoulos and researchers in Bonn and Barcelona Universities.