A Pyramid Scheme for Particle Physics

TL;DR

The paper proposes the Pyramid Scheme, a novel SUSY breaking model compatible with Cosmological SUSY Breaking, addressing gauge coupling issues and providing a dark matter candidate with distinctive decay properties.

Contribution

It introduces the Pyramid Scheme, combining trinification unification with solutions to Landau pole and stellar cooling problems, and predicts a unique dark matter candidate.

Findings

Compatible with Cosmological SUSY Breaking

Dark matter decays mainly into leptons

Reheat temperature in the TeV range

Abstract

We introduce a new model, the Pyramid Scheme, of direct mediation of SUSY breaking, which is compatible with the idea of Cosmological SUSY Breaking (CSB). It uses the trinification scheme of grand unification and avoids problems with Landau poles in standard model gauge couplings. It also avoids problems, which have recently come to light, associated with rapid stellar cooling due to emission of the pseudo Nambu-Goldstone Boson (PNGB) of spontaneously broken hidden sector baryon number. With a certain pattern of R-symmetry breaking masses, a pattern more or less required by CSB, the Pyramid Scheme leads to a dark matter candidate that decays predominantly into leptons, with cross sections compatible with a variety of recent observations. The dark matter particle is not a thermal WIMP but a particle with new strong interactions, produced in the late decay of some other scalar, perhaps the superpartner of the QCD axion, with a reheat temperature in the TeV range. This is compatible with a variety of scenarios for baryogenesis, including some novel ones which exploit specific features of the Pyramid Scheme.