SUSY breaking by a metastable ground state: why the early Universe preferred the non-supersymmetric vacuum

2006/10/31 by Steven Abel, Steven A. Abel, Chong‐Sun Chu +3 · 5 citations
Physics and Astronomy · #Black Holes and Theoretical Physics #Cosmology and Gravitation Theories #Particle physics theoretical and experimental studies #astro-ph #hep-ph #hep-th

paper · pdf · doi:10.1088/1126-6708/2007/01/089

published as JHEP 0701:089,2007 · 17 pages, 3 figures, v3: References added, minor corrections

arxiv created 2007/01/16 · openalex publication_date 2007/01/25 · arxiv updated 2009/12/01 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28

Abstract

Supersymmetry breaking in a metastable vacuum is re-examined in a cosmological context. It is shown that thermal effects generically drive the Universe to the metastable minimum even if it begins in the supersymmetry-preserving one. This is a generic feature of the ISS models of metastable supersymmetry breaking due to the fact that SUSY preserving vacua contain fewer light degrees of freedom than the metastable ground state at the origin. These models of metastable SUSY breaking are thus placed on an equal footing with the more usual dynamical SUSY breaking scenarios.

Citations

• Exact results on the space of vacua of four-dimensional SUSY gauge theories
• A note on (meta)stable brane configurations in MQCD
• Tunneling without barriers
• Constraints from inflation and reheating on superpartner masses
• Non-supersymmetric meta-stable vacua in SU(N) SQCD with adjoint matter
• Landscape of supersymmetry breaking vacua in geometrically realized gauge theories
• Charge and colour breaking constraints in the MSSM with non-universal SUSY breaking
• Lectures on supersymmetric gauge theories and electric-magnetic duality

Cited by

• ISS-flation
• O'KKLT at finite temperature
• Dark radiation as a signature of dark energy
• Metastable supersymmetry breaking and supergravity at finite temperature
• Gaugino versus sfermion masses in gauge mediation