Metastable SUSY Breaking - Predicting the Fate of the Universe

TL;DR

This paper discusses metastable supersymmetry breaking, its natural cosmological occurrence, and how current and future experiments like the LHC can test the stability of the universe's vacuum state.

Contribution

It highlights the cosmological naturalness of metastable SUSY breaking and connects it with experimental tests, especially in gauge mediation scenarios.

Findings

Universe is naturally driven into metastable vacuum during early universe.

Metastability is testable through collider experiments like the LHC.

Low-scale SUSY breaking models favor metastability due to Nelson-Seiberg theorem.

Abstract

The possibility that supersymmetry (SUSY) could be broken in a metastable vacuum has recently attracted renewed interest. In these proceedings we will argue that metastability is an attractive and testable scenario. The recent developments were triggered by the presentation of a simple and calculable model of metastable SUSY breaking by Intriligator, Seiberg and Shih (ISS), which we will briefly review. One of the main questions raised by metastability is, why did the universe end up in this vacuum. Using the ISS model as an example we will argue that in a large class of models the universe is automatically driven into the metastable state during the early hot phase and gets trapped there. This makes metastability a natural option from the cosmological point of view. However, it may be more than that. The phenomenologically required gaugino masses require the breaking of R-symmetry. However, in scenarios with a low supersymmetry breaking scale, e.g., gauge mediation a powerful theorem due to Nelson and Seiberg places this at odds with supersymmetry breaking in a truely stable state and metstability becomes (nearly) inevitable. Turning around one can now experimentally test whether gauge mediation is realised in nature thereby automatically testing the possibility of a metastability of the vacuum. Indeed, already the LHC may give us crucial information about the stability of the vacuum.