2005/01/30 by Michael Dine, M. Dine, D. O'Neil +3 · 80 citations
Mathematics · Physics and Astronomy · #A priori and a posteriori #Anthropic principle #Black Holes and Theoretical Physics #Conjecture #Cosmological constant #Cosmology #Cosmology and Gravitation Theories #Epistemology #Mathematics #Naturalness #Particle physics #Particle physics theoretical and experimental studies #Philosophy #Physics #Pure mathematics #Quantum mechanics #Scale (ratio) #Simple (philosophy) #String (physics) #String theory #Supersymmetry #Supersymmetry breaking #Theoretical physics #hep-ph #hep-th
paper · pdf · doi:10.1088/1126-6708/2005/07/014
published in Journal of High Energy Physics 2005(07), 014 (Springer Nature) · 21 pages, typos corrected, references added
arxiv created 2005/01/30 · openalex publication_date 2005/07/06 · arxiv updated 2009/12/01 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/08/05
With respect to the question of supersymmetry breaking, there are three branches of the flux landscape. On one of these, if one requires small cosmological constant, supersymmetry breaking is predominantly at the fundamental scale; on another, the distribution is roughly flat on a logarithmic scale; on the third, the preponderance of vacua are at very low scale. A priori, as we will explain, one can say little about the first branch. The vast majority of these states are not accessible even to crude, approximate analysis. On the other two branches one can hope to do better. But as a result of the lack of access to branch one, and our poor understanding of cosmology, we can at best conjecture about whether string theory predicts low energy supersymmetry or not. If we hypothesize that are on branch two or three, distinctive predictions may be possible. We comment of the status of naturalness within the landscape, deriving, for example, the statistics of the first branch from simple effective field theory reasoning.