HEP Theory Journal Club

The many uses of colored scalars

Jim CLine

McGill

Squarks are a familiar example of scalar colored triplets from supersymmetry, but such fields can also play important roles in nonsupersymmetric models. In this talk I review three far-flung examples where they recently appeared. In the first, they allow for UV-completion of a low-energy effective theory of neutron-dark matter oscillations. In the second, they enable a model of pseudo-Goldstone boson dark matter to explain hints of excess collider signals around 96 GeV, with testable implications for the effective couplings of the Higgs boson and cosmic gamma rays. The final example is an economical theory of inflation that simultaneously produces the baryon asymmetry, with possibly observable tensor and isocurvature perturbations.