Physics Theses and Dissertations

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https://hdl.handle.net/1794/2048

This collection contains some of the theses and dissertations produced by students in the University of Oregon Physics Graduate Program. Paper copies of these and other dissertations and theses are available through the UO Libraries.

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Browsing Physics Theses and Dissertations by Author "Barello, Gregory"

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    Models and Constraints for New Physics at the Energy, Intensity, and Cosmic Frontiers
    (University of Oregon, 2016-10-27) Barello, Gregory; Chang, Spencer
    The modern era of particle physics is driven by experimental anomalies. Experimental efforts have become increasingly diverse and are producing enormous volumes of data. In such a highly data-driven scientific environment theoretical models are necessary to understand this data and to help inform the development of new experimental approaches. In this dissertation I present two significant contributions to this effort relevant to the energy, intensity, and cosmic frontiers of modern particle physics research. Part 1 of this dissertation discusses methods to understand modern dark matter direct detection results. In particular I present an analysis under the hypothesis of inelastic dark matter, which supposes that dark matter must scatter inelastically, i.e. that it must gain or loose mass during a collision with atomic nuclei. This hypothesis is attractive because it can alleviate otherwise contradictory results from a number of dark matter detection facilities. The main conclusion of this work is a presentation of the analytical tools, along with a mathematica package that can be used to run the analysis, and the discovery that there are regions of inelastic dark matter parameter space which are consistent with all current experimental results, and constraints. Part 2 of this dissertation discusses a phenomenon of modern interest called kinetic mixing which allows particles from the standard model to spontaneously transform into particles which experience a new, as of yet undiscovered, force. This phenomenon is relatively common and well motivated theoretically and has motivated significant experimental effort. In this work, I present an analysis of a general case of kinetic mixing, called nonabelian kinetic mixing. This work shows that, In general, kinetic mixing predicts the existence of a new particle and that, under certain conditions, this particle could be detected at modern particle colliders. Furthermore, the mass of this particle is related to the strength of kinetic mixing. This relationship suggests novel ways to constrain kinetic mixing parameter space, and if observed would provide a very striking indication that such a model is realized in nature.