No Arabic abstract
Obtaining realistic supersymmetry preserving vacua in the minimal renormalizable supersymmetric $Spin(10)$ GUT model introduces considerations of the non-trivial topology of the vacuum manifold. The $D$-parity of low energy unification schemes gets lifted to a one-parameter subgroup $U(1)_D$ of $Spin(10)$. Yet, the choice of the fields signaling spontaneous symmetry breaking leads to disconnected subsets in the vacuum manifold related by the $D$-parity. The resulting domain walls, existing due to topological reasons but not stable, are identified as topological pseudodefects. We obtain a class of one-parameter paths connecting $D$-parity flipped vacua and compute the energy barrier height along the same. We consider the various patterns of symmetry breaking which can result in either intermediate scale gauge groups or a supersymmetric extension of the Standard Model. If the onset of inflation is subsequent to GUT breaking, as could happen also if inflation is naturally explained by the same GUT, the existence of such pseudodefects can leave signatures in the CMB. Specifically, this could have an impact on the scale invariance of the CMB fluctuations and LSS data at the largest scale.
The extended supersymmetric SO(10) model with missing partner mechanism is studied. An intermediate vacuum expectation value is incorporated which corresponds to the see-saw scale. Gauge coupling unification is not broken explicitly. Proton decay is found to satisfy the present experimental limits at the cost of fine-tuning some parameters.
We employ a variety of symmetry breaking patterns in $SO(10)$ and $E_6$ Grand Unified Theories to demonstrate the appearance of topological defects including magnetic monopoles, strings, and necklaces. We show that independent of the symmetry breaking pattern, a topologically stable superheavy monopole carrying a single unit of Dirac charge as well as color magnetic charge is always present. Lighter intermediate mass topologically stable monopoles carrying two or three quanta of Dirac charge can appear in $SO(10)$ and $E_6$ models respectively. These lighter monopoles as well as topologically stable intermediate scale strings can survive an inflationary epoch. We also show the appearance of a novel necklace configuration in $SO(10)$ broken to the Standard Model via $SU(4)_ctimes SU(2)_Ltimes SU(2)_R$. It consists of $SU(4)_c$ and $SU(2)_R$ monopoles connected by flux tubes. Necklaces consisting of monopoles and antimonopoles joined together by flux tubes are also identified. Even in the absence of topologically stable strings, a monopole-string system can temporarily appear. This system decays by emitting gravity waves and we provide an example in which the spectrum of these waves is strongly peaked around $10^{-4}~{rm Hz}$ with $Omega_{rm gw}h^2simeq 10^{-12}$. This spectrum should be within the detection capability of LISA.
We apply the perturbative grand unification due to renormalization to distinguish TeV-scale relics of supersymmetric $rm{SO}(10)$ scenarios. With rational theoretical constraints taken into account, we find that for the breaking pattern of either $rm{SU}(5)$ or Pati-Salam only extra matter $mathbf{16}$ supermultiplet of $SO(10)$ can appear at TeV scale, apart from MSSM spectrum.
We study the supersymmetric spontaneous symmetry breaking of SO(10) into SU(3)xSU(2)xU(1) for the most physically interesting cases of SU(5) or flipped SU(5)xU(1) intermediate symmetries. The first case is more easily realized while the second one requires a fine-tuning condition on the parameters of the superpotential. This is because in the case of SU(5) symmetry there is at most one singlet of the residual symmetry in each SO(10) irreducible representation. We also point out on more general grounds in supersymmetric GUTs that some intermediate symmetries can be exactly realized and others can only be approximated by fine-tuning. In the first category, there could occur some tunneling between the vacua with exact and approximate intermediate symmetry. The flipped SU(5)xU(1) symmetry improves the unification of gauge couplings if (B-L) is broken by (B-L)=1 scalars yielding right handed neutrino masses below 10^{14} GeV}.
We embed the flipped SU(5) models into the SO(10) models. After the SO(10) gauge symmetry is broken down to the flipped SU(5) times U(1)_X gauge symmetry, we can split the five/one-plets and ten-plets in the spinor mathbf{16} and mathbf{bar{16}} Higgs fields via the stable sliding singlet mechanism. As in the flipped SU(5) models, these ten-plet Higgs fields can break the flipped SU(5) gauge symmetry down to the Standard Model gauge symmetry. The doublet-triplet splitting problem can be solved naturally by the missing partner mechanism, and the Higgsino-exchange mediated proton decay can be suppressed elegantly. Moreover, we show that there exists one pair of the light Higgs doublets for the electroweak gauge symmetry breaking. Because there exist two pairs of additional vector-like particles with similar intermediate-scale masses, the SU(5) and U(1)_X gauge couplings can be unified at the GUT scale which is reasonably (about one or two orders) higher than the SU(2)_L times SU(3)_C unification scale. Furthermore, we briefly discuss the simplest SO(10) model with flipped SU(5) embedding, and point out that it can not work without fine-tuning.