This report summarises the activities of the working group on ‘Physics beyond the Standard Model’. The results of investigations in incorporatingR-parity in grand unification, the possibility of a light charged Higgs boson in extension of MSSM and radiative generation of neutral vector boson self-couplings within the MSSM are described. Also given is an account of activities in neutrino physics, namely a proposal for a study of the atmospheric muon anomaly in deep underground mines, a field theoretic study of neutrino oscillations and a mechanism to generate appropriate masses of three active plus one sterile neutrino species.

This is a summary of the beyond the Standard Model (including model building) working group of the WHEPP-X workshop held at Chennai from January 3 to 15, 2008.

It is well known that dark matter dominates the dynamics of galaxies and clusters of galaxies. Its constituents remain a mystery despite an assiduous search for them over the past three decades. Recent results from the satellite-based PAMELA experiment show an excess in the positron fraction at energies between 10 and 100 GeV in the secondary cosmic ray spectrum. Other experiments, namely ATIC, HESS and FERMI, show an excess in the total electron $(e^+ + e^−)$ spectrum for energies greater than 100 GeV. These excesses in the positron fraction as well as the electron spectrum can arise in local astrophysical processes like pulsars, or can be attributed to the annihilation of the dark matter particles. The latter possibility gives clues to the possible candidates for the dark matter in galaxies and other astrophysical systems. In this article, we give a report of these exciting developments.

Lepton mass hierarchies and lepton flavour violation are revisited in the framework of Randall–Sundrum models. Models with Dirac-type as well as Majorana-type neutrinos are considered. The five-dimensional 𝑐-parameters are fit to the charged lepton and neutrino masses and mixings using $\chi^{2}$ minimization. Leptonic flavour violation is shown to be large in these cases. Schemes of minimal flavour violation are considered for the cases of an effective LLHH operator and Dirac neutrinos and are shown to significantly reduce the limits from lepton flavour violation.