2 Our discussion here follows closely the review in Sec. 8 of [21]. 3 Note that the mass of the graviton is stringently constrained by gravitational wave experiments to be m < 1.22 × 10 −22 eV/c 2 [23]. 4 The relative coefficients between the two terms in the mass term are chosen to avoid propagating ghost degrees of freedom. For more details, consult footnote 7.

We investigate methods to explore the CP nature of the tth coupling at the LHC, focusing on associated production of the Higgs with a tt pair. We first discuss the constraints implied by low-energy observables and by the Higgs-rate information from available LHC data, emphasizing that they cannot provide conclusive evidence on the nature of this coupling. We then investigate kinematic observables that could probe the tth coupling directly, in particular quantities that can be constructed out of just lab-frame kinematics. We define one such observable by exploiting the fact that tt spin correlations do also carry information about the CP-nature of the tth coupling. Finally, we introduce a CP-odd quantity and a related asymmetry, able to probe CP violation in the tth coupling and likewise constructed out of lab-frame momenta only.

We revisit the constraints on the parameter space of the Minimal Supersymmetric Standard Model (MSSM), from charge and color breaking minima in the light of information on the Higgs from the LHC so far. We study the behavior of the scalar potential keeping two light sfermion fields along with the Higgs in the pMSSM framework and analyze the stability of the vacuum. We find that for lightest stops 1 TeV and small µ 500 GeV, the absolute stability of the potential can be attained only for |X t | 6mt 1 mt 2 . The bounds become stronger for larger values of the µ parameter. Note that this is approximately the value of X t which maximizes the Higgs mass. Our bounds on the low scale MSSM parameters are more stringent than those reported earlier in literature. We reanalyze the stau sector as well, keeping both staus. We study the connections between the observed Higgs rates and vacuum (meta)stability. We show how a precision study of the ratio of signal strengths, (µ γγ /µ ZZ ) can shed further light.

We consider the (2 + 1) flavor Polyakov Quark Meson Model and study the effect of including fermion vacuum fluctuations on the thermodynamics and phase diagram. The resulting model predictions are compared to the recent QCD lattice simulations by the HotQCD and Wuppertal-Budapest collaborations. The variation of the thermodynamic quantities across the phase transition region becomes smoother. This results in better agreement with the lattice data. Depending on the value of the mass of the sigma meson, including the vacuum term results in either pushing the critical end point into higher values of the chemical potential or excluding the possibility of a critical end point altogether.

Determining the spin and the parity quantum numbers of the recently discovered Higgs-like boson at the LHC is a matter of great importance. In this paper, we consider the possibility of using the kinematics of the tagging jets in Higgs production via the vector boson fusion (VBF) process to test the tensor structure of the Higgs-vector boson (HV V ) interaction and to determine the spin and CP properties of the observed resonance. We show that an anomalous HV V vertex, in particular its explicit momentum dependence, drastically affects the rapidity between the two scattered quarks and their transverse momenta and, hence, the acceptance of the kinematical cuts that allow to select the VBF topology. The sensitivity of these observables to different spin-parity assignments, including the dependence on the LHC center of mass energy, are evaluated. In addition, we show that in associated Higgs production with a vector boson some kinematical variables, such as the invariant mass of the system and the transverse momenta of the two bosons and their separation in rapidity, are also sensitive to the spin-parity assignments of the Higgs-like boson.