SISSA NCG seminars

[Emanuele Tuillier Illingworth]

SISSA NCG Seminars
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Thursday, October 16, 4 P.M., room 136:
Speaker: Dr. Pierre Martinetti (Università di Trieste)
Title: "Standard model in Noncommutative geometry after the discovery of 
the Higgs"

We will give an overview of the description of the standard model of 
elementary particles
in Connes? noncommutative geometry, focusing on the calculation of the 
mass of the Higgs boson.
The early prediction, around 170GeV, has been ruled out by Tevatron in 
2008. Surprisingly, the
« low » value of the recently discovered 126 GeV Higgs boson allowed a 
resilience of the model.
This is because for such a light Higgs, there is an instability of the 
electroweak vacuum that can be cured by assuming the existence of 
another heavy scalar field. Connes and Chamseddine pointed out that this 
field, correctly coupled to the Higgs, was in fact "naturally" present 
in the model. We will discuss how "natural", stressing the intimate link 
between the new field and one of the mathematical properties of the 
Dirac operator,
namely the first order condition.

***

Thursday, October 23, 4 P.M., room 136:
Speaker: Dr. Pierre Martinetti (Università di Trieste)
Title: "Twisting the standard model and spontaneous breaking of the 
grand symmetry"

This second talk will focus on how to generate within noncommutative 
geometry framework  the extra scalar field required to stabilize the 
electroweak vacuum. This field violates the first order condition, and a 
possible solution is to start from a "grand algebra" bigger than the one 
of the standard model. The extra scalar field is then generated as a 
"fluctuation" of the Majorana mass of the right neutrino, in a way 
satisfying a twisted version of the first order condition.
Furthermore, the reduction of this "grand symmetry" to the standard 
model is dynamical, and occurs as a minimum of the spectral action.