Solitonic supersymmetry restoration

TL;DR

This paper investigates how Q-balls influence the stability of metastable supersymmetry-breaking vacua, revealing that they can cause rapid phase transitions unless certain model parameters are sufficiently large.

Contribution

It demonstrates that Q-balls significantly affect vacuum longevity in supersymmetry models, leading to potential rapid decay unless specific conditions are met.

Findings

Models with minimal gauge mediation undergo rapid phase transition unless messenger mass > 10^8 GeV.

ISS models decay quickly unless superpotential coupling exceeds Standard Model gauge couplings.

Q-balls can induce catastrophic vacuum decay in broad classes of supersymmetry-breaking models.

Abstract

Q-balls are a possible feature of any model with a conserved, global U(1) symmetry and no massless, charged scalars. It is shown that for a broad class of models of metastable supersymmetry breaking they are extremely influential on the vacuum lifetime and make seemingly viable vacua catastrophically short lived. A net charge asymmetry is not required as there is often a significant range of parameter space where statistical fluctuations alone are sufficient. This effect is examined for two supersymmetry breaking scenarios. It is found that models of minimal gauge mediation (which necessarily have a messenger number U(1)) undergo a rapid, supersymmetry restoring phase transition unless the messenger mass is greater than 10^8 GeV. Similarly the ISS model, in the context of direct mediation, quickly decays unless the perturbative superpotential coupling is greater than the Standard Model gauge couplings.