Cosmological vacuum selection and metastable susy breaking

TL;DR

This paper investigates the conditions under which metastable supersymmetry breaking vacua can be selected in the early universe, considering thermal effects, initial conditions, and model deformations, with implications for cosmology and phenomenology.

Contribution

It demonstrates that specific initial conditions and model modifications can favor metastable susy breaking vacua despite thermalization effects.

Findings

Thermalization often disfavors metastable susy breaking vacua.

Displaced initial conditions can lead to susy breaking vacuum realization.

Model deformations do not significantly alter the main conclusions.

Abstract

We study gauge mediation in a wide class of O'Raifeartaigh type models where supersymmetry breaking metastable vacuum is created by gravity and/or quantum corrections. We examine their thermal evolution in the early universe and the conditions under which the susy breaking vacuum can be selected. It is demonstrated that thermalization typically makes the metastable supersymmetry breaking cosmologically disfavoured but this is not always the case. Initial conditions with the spurion displaced from the symmetric thermal minimum and a small coupling to the messenger sector can result in the realization of the susy breaking vacuum even if the reheating temperature is high. We show that this can be achieved without jeopardizing the low energy phenomenology. In addition, we have found that deforming the models by a supersymmetric mass term for messengers in such a way that the susy breaking minimum and the susy preserving minima are all far away from the origin does not change the conclusions. The basic observations are expected to hold also in the case of models with an anomalous U(1) group.