Logotyp: till Uppsala universitets webbplats

For more than 30 years the Standard Model has been the theoretical foundation for particle physics. The theory has been verified successfully by experimental tests. Its biggest shortcoming is the non-discovery of the Higgs boson,responsible for giving the other particles masses. Despite its success there are hints that the Standard Model is not the complete theory and many extensions of it, such as supersymmetry, have been proposed.

Extended theories often predict the existence of a charged Higgs boson and its detection will be a clear sign of physics beyond the Standard Model. The main focus in this thesis is on various phenomenological aspects of the charged Higgs boson. For favorable mass and couplings direct detection is shown to be possible at the Large Hadron Collider in production with an associated W boson. It is also shown how a light charged Higgs can have measurable effects on spin correlations in decays of pair-produced top quarks. The charged Higgs boson can also be seen indirectly, in for example B-meson decays, which can be used to put constraints on its mass and fermion couplings. Exclusion limits in two supersymmetric models are given together with a comparison with the discovery potentials for the LHC experiments. A tool for calculating properties, such as masses and decays, of both charged and neutral Higgs bosons in the Two-Higgs-Doublet Model is also presented.

B-meson decays can also be used to test aspects of the strong interaction. Part of this thesis deals with improving and applying phenomenological models to B-meson decays. Although these models are not derived from first principles, their success shows that they capture important features of non-perturbative strong interactions.

The Standard Model of particle physics successfully describes present collider data. Nevertheless, theoretical and cosmological results call for its extension. A softly broken supersymmetric completion around the TeV scale solves several of the outstanding issues. Supersymmetry requires two Higgs doublets, leading to five physical Higgs states. These include a pair of charged Higgs bosons H^±, which are a generic feature of theories with multiple Higgs doublets. Using results from high-energy colliders and flavour physics, constraints are derived on the charged Higgs boson mass and couplings; both for constrained scenarios in the minimal supersymmetric standard model (MSSM) with grand unification, and for general two-Higgs-doublet models. The MSSM results are compared to the projected reach for charged Higgs searches at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC). At the LHC, a light charged Higgs is accessible through top quark decay. Beyond a discovery, it is demonstrated how angular distributions sensitive to top quark spin correlations can be used to determine the structure of the H^±tb coupling. The public code 2HDMC, which performs calculations in a general, CP-conserving, two-Higgs-doublet model, is introduced.

In parallel to the developments at colliders, the most energetic particles ever recorded are the ultra-high-energy (UHE) cosmic rays. To gain more insight into their origin, new experiments are searching for UHE neutrinos. These searches require detectors of vast volume, which can be achieved by searching for coherent radio pulses arising from the Askaryan effect. The prospects of using a satellite orbiting the Moon to search for neutrino interactions are investigated, and a similar study for an Earth-based radio telescope is presented. In both cases, the method is found competitive for detection of the very highest energy neutrinos considered.