Renormalization of the S parameter in holographic models of electroweak symmetry breaking

We show that the S parameter is not finite in theories of electroweak symmetry breaking in a slice of anti-de Sitter five-dimensional space, with the light fermions localized in the ultraviolet. We compute the one-loop contributions to S from the Higgs sector and show that they are logarithmically dependent on the cutoff of the theory. We discuss the renormalization of S, as well as the implications for bounds from electroweak precision measurements on these models. We argue that, although in principle the choice of renormalization condition could eliminate the S parameter constraint, a more consistent condition would still result in a large and positive S. On the other hand, we show that the dependence on the Higgs mass in S can be entirely eliminated by the renormalization procedure, making it impossible in these theories to extract a Higgs mass bound from electroweak precision constraints.

An analysis of the composite stellar population in M32

We obtained long-slit spectra of high signal-to-noise ratio of the galaxy M32 with the Gemini Multi-Object Spectrograph at the Gemini-North telescope. We analysed the integrated spectra by means of full spectral fitting in order to extract the mixture of stellar populations that best represents its composite nature. Three different galactic radii were analysed, from the nuclear region out to 2 arcmin from the centre. This allows us to compare, for the first time, the results of integrated light spectroscopy with those of resolved colour-magnitude diagrams from the literature. As a main result we propose that an ancient and an intermediate-age population co-exist in M32, and that the balance between these two populations change between the nucleus and outside one effective radius (1r(eff)) in the sense that the contribution from the intermediate population is larger at the nuclear region. We retrieve a smaller signal of a young population at all radii whose origin is unclear and may be a contamination from horizontal branch stars, such as the ones identified by Brown et al. in the nuclear region. We compare our metallicity distribution function for a region 1 to 2 arcmin from the centre to the one obtained with photometric data by Grillmair et al. Both distributions are broad, but our spectroscopically derived distribution has a significant component with [Z/Z(circle dot)] <= -1, which is not found by Grillmair et al.