No Arabic abstract
We initiate the study of gravitational wave (GW) signals from first-order phase transitions in supersymmetry-breaking hidden sectors. Such phase transitions often occur along a pseudo-flat direction universally related to supersymmetry (SUSY) breaking in hidden sectors that spontaneously break $R$-symmetry. The potential along this pseudo-flat direction imbues the phase transition with a number of novel properties, including a nucleation temperature well below the scale of heavy states (such that the temperature dependence is captured by the low-temperature expansion) and significant friction induced by the same heavy states as they pass through bubble walls. In low-energy SUSY-breaking hidden sectors, the frequency of the GW signal arising from such a phase transition is guaranteed to lie within the reach of future interferometers given existing cosmological constraints on the gravitino abundance. Once a mediation scheme is specified, the frequency of the GW peak correlates with the superpartner spectrum. Current bounds on supersymmetry are compatible with GW signals at future interferometers, while the observation of a GW signal from a SUSY-breaking hidden sector would imply superpartners within reach of future colliders.
We study the scenario that conformal dynamics leads to metastable supersymmetry breaking vacua. At a high energy scale, the superpotential is not R-symmetric, and has a supersymmetric minimum. However, conformal dynamics suppresses several operators along renormalization group flow toward the infrared fixed point. Then we can find an approximately R-symmetric superpotential, which has a metastable supersymmetry breaking vacuum, and the supersymmetric vacuum moves far away from the metastable supersymmetry breaking vacuum. We show a 4D simple model. Furthermore, we can construct 5D models with the same behavior, because of the AdS/CFT dual.
We demonstrate that Dirac neutrino masses in the experimentally preferred range are generated within supersymmetric gauge extensions of the Standard Model with a generalized supersymmetry breaking sector. If the usual superpotential Yukawa couplings are forbidden by the additional gauge symmetry (such as a U(1)), effective Dirac mass terms involving the wrong Higgs field can arise either at tree level due to hard supersymmetry breaking fermion Yukawa couplings, or at one-loop due to nonanalytic or nonholomorphic soft supersymmetry breaking trilinear scalar couplings. As both of these operators are naturally suppressed in generic models of supersymmetry breaking, the resulting neutrino masses are naturally in the sub-eV range. The neutrino magnetic and electric dipole moments resulting from the radiative mechanism also vanish at one-loop order.
Various theoretical and experimental considerations motivate models with high scale supersymmetry breaking. While such models may be difficult to test in colliders, we propose looking for signatures at much lower energies. We show that a keV line in the X-ray spectrum of galaxy clusters (such as the recently disputed 3.5 keV observation) can have its origin in a universal string axion coupled to a hidden supersymmetry breaking sector. A linear combination of the string axion and an additional axion in the hidden sector remains light, obtaining a mass of order 10 keV through supersymmetry breaking dynamics. In order to explain the X-ray line, the scale of supersymmetry breaking must be about $10^{11-12}$ GeV. This motivates high scale supersymmetry as in pure gravity mediation or minimal split supersymmetry and is consistent with all current limits. Since the axion mass is controlled by a dynamical mass scale, this mass can be much higher during inflation, avoiding isocurvature (and domain wall) problems associated with high scale inflation. In an appendix we present a mechanism for dilaton stabilization that additionally leads to $mathcal{O}(1)$ modifications of the gaugino mass from anomaly mediation.
We construct new theories of electroweak symmetry breaking that employ a combination of supersymmetry and discrete symmetries to stabilize the weak scale up to and beyond the energies probed by the LHC. These models exhibit conventional supersymmetric spectra but the fermion-sfermion-gaugino vertices are absent. This closes many conventional decay channels, thereby allowing several superpartners to be stable on collider time scales. This opens the door to the possibility of directly observing R-hadrons and three flavors of sleptons inside the LHC detectors.
We examine the contribution of small instantons to the axion mass in various UV completions of QCD. We show that the reason behind the potential dominance of such contributions is the non-trivial embedding of QCD into the UV theory. The effects from instantons in the partially broken gauge group appear as fractional instanton corrections in the effective theory. These will exhibit unusual dependences on the various scales in the problem whenever the index of embedding is non-trivial. We present a full one-instanton calculation of the axion mass in the simplest product group models, carefully keeping track of numerical prefactors. Rather than using a t Hooft operator approximation we directly evaluate the contributions to the vacuum bubble, automatically capturing the effects of closing up external fermion lines with Higgs loops. This approach is manifestly finite and removes the uncertainty associated with introducing a cutoff scale for the Higgs loops. We verify that the small instantons may dominate over the QCD contribution for very high breaking scales and at least three group factors.