Warped Extra Dimensions, discrete flavor symmetries and domain wall brane cosmology

PhD ceremony: Mr. A. Kadosh, 14.30 uur, Academiegebouw, Broerstraat 5, Groningen

Dissertation: Warped Extra Dimensions, discrete flavor symmetries and domain wall brane cosmology

Promotor(s): prof. E. Pallante

Faculty: Mathematics and Natural Sciences

The long term aim of the research performed in this thesis is to establish a new unified framework in the context of Warped Extra Dimensions (WED), which will enable the construction of phenomenological models with concrete experimental signatures for both particle physics and cosmology. In order to achieve these goals we have pursued a multidisciplinary research focused on two directions. The first is the construction and thorough phenomenological study of a reliable flavor physics model in WED with an additional A4 bulk flavor symmetry, including both the quark and lepton sectors and their implications in flavor and neutrino physics. The second is the establishment of time dependent gravitating domain wall (DW) configurations in 4+1 space-time dimensions (5D), the most elegant dynamical realization of realistic cosmological brane world scenarios. The ‘warped’ A4 model provides a simultaneous explanation of the gauge and flavor hierarchy problems, the smallness of neutrino masses and the nature of neutrino mixing. The latter model is shown to satisfy the most important constraints coming from precision electroweak and flavor physics data. In particular, we analyze the new physics contributions to the Zbb vertex, the neutron EDM, Kaon charge-parity (CP) violating observables and the b->s+gamma decay. In the context of DW brane cosmology we introduce the notion of ‘slinky evolution’ of DW configurations and find a very simple non factorizable time dependent DW solution in (5D) admitting a 'Slinkyvolving’ time evolution, implying an appealing interpretation for the resulting 4D cosmology. We then discuss the problems associated with this solution.