UC San Diego

This dissertation focuses on two aspects of collider physics where physics beyond the Standard Model (SM) may be hiding. In particular, it is a detailed investigation of the top-quark forward-backward asymmetry at the Tevatron, and of the recently discovered Higgs boson. Work done includes the determination of electroweak precision data constraints on flavor symmetric vector fields. As well as showing that the anomalously large top-quark forward-backward asymmetry could have at one point been accommodated in models with flavor-violating couplings of quarks to a new massive spin-2 state. The bottom-quark forward-backward asymmetry at the Tevatron was computed in the SM and for several new physics scenarios. It was also shown that the three-body decays of the resonance recently discovered at the LHC are potentially sensitive to the effects of new physics. In addition, a sum rule is presented for Higgs fields in general representations under $SU(2)_L \times U(1)_Y$ that follows from the connection between the Higgs couplings and the mechanism that gives electroweak bosons mass, which restricts these couplings