Unparticles: Scales and High Energy Probes

Abstract

Unparticles from hidden conformal sectors provide qualitatively new possibilities for physics beyond the standard model. In the theoretical framework of minimal models, we clarify the relation between energy scales entering various phenomenological analyses. We show that these relations always counteract the effective field theory intuition that higher dimension operators are more highly suppressed, and that the requirement of a significant conformal window places strong constraints on possible unparticle signals. With these considerations in mind, we examine some of the most robust and sensitive probes and explore novel effects of unparticles on gauge coupling evolution and fermion production at high energy colliders. These constraints are presented both as bounds on four-fermion interaction scales and as constraints on the fundamental parameter space of minimal models.