Metastable supersymmetry breaking without scales

We construct new examples of models of metastable D=4 N=1 supersymmetry breaking in which all scales are generated dynamically. Our models rely on Seiberg duality and on the ISS mechanism of supersymmetry breaking in massive SQCD. Some of the electric quark superfields arise as composites of a strongly coupled gauge sector. This allows us to start with a simple cubic superpotential and an asymptotically free gauge group in the ultraviolet, and end up with an infrared effective theory which breaks supersymmetry dynamically in a metastable state.Comment: 6 pages, 1 figure; v2: journal versio

Index theory for heteroclinic orbits of Hamiltonian systems

Index theory revealed its outstanding role in the study of periodic orbits of Hamiltonian systems and the dynamical consequences of this theory are enormous. Although the index theory in the periodic case is well-established, very few results are known in the case of homoclinic orbits of Hamiltonian systems. Moreover, to the authors' knowledge, no results have been yet proved in the case of heteroclinic and halfclinic (i.e. parametrised by a half-line) orbits. Motivated by the importance played by these motions in understanding several challenging problems in Classical Mechanics, we develop a new index theory and we prove at once a general spectral flow formula for heteroclinic, homoclinic and halfclinic trajectories. Finally we show how this index theory can be used to recover all the (classical) existing results on orbits parametrised by bounded intervals.Comment: 24 pages, 4 figure

On the dihedral n-body problem

Consider n=2l>=4 point particles with equal masses in space, subject to the following symmetry constraint: at each instant they form an orbit of the dihedral group D_l, where D_l is the group of order 2l generated by two rotations of angle pi around two secant lines in space meeting at an angle of pi/l. By adding a homogeneous gravitational (Newtonian) potential one finds a special $n$-body problem with three degrees of freedom, which is a kind of generalisation of Devaney isosceles problem, in which all orbits have zero angular momentum. In the paper we find all the central configurations and we compute the dimension of the stable/unstable manifolds.Comment: Second version. In the first there was a mistake in a proof: some section had been omitte