Engineering topics
Krnjaic, Gordan Z.
Publications and source records attributed to Krnjaic, Gordan Z..
Weak-triplet, color-octet scalars and the CDF dijet excess
We extend the standard model to include a weak-triplet and color-octet scalar. This 'octo-triplet' field consists of three particles, two charged and one neutral, whose masses and renormalizable interactions depend only on two new parameters. The charged octo-triplet decay into a W boson and a gluon is suppressed by a loop factor and an accidental cancellation. Thus, the main decays of the charged octo-triplet may occur through higher-dimensional operators, mediated by a heavy vectorlike fermion, into quark pairs. For an octo-triplet mass below the tb¯ threshold, the decay into Wb b¯ through an off-shell top quark has a width comparable to that into cs¯ or cb¯. Pair production with one octo-triplet decaying to two jets and the other decaying to a W and two soft b jets may explain the dijet-plus-W excess reported by the CDF Collaboration. The same higher-dimensional operators lead to CP violation in B s -B¯ s mixing.
Dark atoms: asymmetry and direct detection
We present a simple UV completion of Atomic Dark Matter (aDM) in which heavy right-handed neutrinos decay to induce both dark and lepton number densities. This model addresses several outstanding cosmological problems: the matter/anti-matter asymmetry, the dark matter abundance, the number of light degrees of freedom in the early universe, and the smoothing of small-scale structure. Additionally, this realization of aDM may reconcile the CoGeNT excess with recently published null results and predicts a signal in the CRESST Oxygen band. We also find that, due to unscreened long-range interactions, the residual unrecombined dark ions settle into a diffuse isothermal halo.
Atomic dark matter
We propose that dark matter is dominantly comprised of atomic bound states. We build a simple model and map the parameter space that results in the early universe formation of hydrogen-like dark atoms. We find that atomic dark matter has interesting implications for cosmology as well as direct detection: Weak-scale dark atoms can accommodate hyperfine splittings of order 100 keV, consistent with the inelastic dark matter interpretation of the DAMA data while naturally evading direct detection bounds. Moreover, protohalo formation can be suppressed below M{sub proto} ∼ 10{sup 3}–10{sup 6}M{sub s}un for weak scale dark matter due to Ion-Radiation and Ion-Atom interactions in the dark sector.