Reheating Metastable O'Raifeartaigh Models
11/1/2006
87 citations (81 excluding self-citations). Addressed a cosmological consistency question for models of dynamical supersymmetry breaking that rely on metastable vacua.
The Problem
Intriligator, Seiberg, and Shih’s discovery that supersymmetry can be broken in long-lived metastable vacua of simple gauge theories opened a new approach to SUSY breaking. But metastable means not eternal: if the universe is reheated to a temperature above the barrier height between the metastable and true vacuum, thermal fluctuations could trigger a transition to the supersymmetric ground state, undoing SUSY breaking and making the model cosmologically unviable.
The Key Result
The paper demonstrates that in a class of O’Raifeartaigh models (the simplest models of F-term SUSY breaking), the thermal transition does not occur even at arbitrarily high reheating temperatures. The thermal effective potential preserves the metastable vacuum. The model survives cosmological scrutiny, removing a potential obstacle to the metastable SUSY breaking program.
Recollections
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