Natural Inflation from 5D SUGRA and Low Reheat Temperature

Motivated by recent cosmological observations of a possibly unsuppressed primordial tensor component $r$ of inflationary perturbations, we reanalyse in detail the 5D conformal SUGRA originated natural inflation model of Ref. [1]. The model is a supersymmetric variant of 5D extra natural inflation, also based on a shift symmetry, and leads to the potential of natural inflation. Coupling the bulk fields generating the inflaton potential via a gauge coupling to the inflaton with brane SM states we necessarily obtain a very slow gauge inflaton decay rate and a very low reheating temperature $T_r\stackrel{<}{_\sim }{\cal O}(100)$~GeV. Analysis of the required number of e-foldings (from the CMB observations) leads to values of $n_s$ in the lower range of present Planck 2015 results. Some related theoretical issues of the construction, along with phenomenological and cosmological implications, are also discussed.Comment: Analysis and discussions updated in light of recent Planck and joint analysis of BICEP2/Keck and Planck result

The MSSM from Scherk-Schwarz Supersymmetry Breaking

We present a five-dimensional model compactified on an interval where supersymmetry is broken by the Scherk-Schwarz mechanism. The gauge sector propagates in the bulk, two Higgs hypermultiplets are quasilocalized, and quark and lepton multiplets localized, in one of the boundaries. The effective four-dimensional theory is the MSSM with very heavy gauginos, heavy squarks and light sleptons and Higgsinos. The soft tree-level squared masses of the Higgs sector can be negative and they can (partially) cancel the positive one-loop contributions from the gauge sector. Electroweak symmetry breaking can then comfortably be triggered by two-loop radiative corrections from the top-stop sector. The fine tuning required to obtain the electroweak scale is found to be much smaller than in the MSSM, with essentially no fine-tuning for few TeV gaugino masses. All bounds from direct Higgs searches at LEP and from electroweak precision observables can be satisfied. The lightest supersymmetric particle is a (Higgsino-like) neutralino that can accomodate the abundance of Dark Matter consistently with recent WMAP observations.Comment: 23 pages, 3 figure

Radioactive ion beams for solid state research

Radioactive isotopes are widely used in many research fields. In some applications they are used as tracers after diffusion or after activation in the material itself through nuclear reactions. For research in solid state physics, the ion implantation technique is the most flexible and convenient method to introduce the radioactive isotopes in the materials to be studied, since it allows the control of the ion dose, the implantation depth and the isotopic purity. The on-line coupling of isotope separators to particle accelerators, as is the case of the ISOLDE facility at CERN, allows the obtention of a wide range of high purity short lived isotopes. Currently, the most stringent limitation for some applications is the low acceleration energy of 60 keV of the ISOLDE beam. In this communication a short review of the current applications of the radioactive beams for research in solid state physics at ISOLDE is done. The development of a post-accelerator facility for MeV radioactive ions is introduced and the advantages of energetic radioactive beams are discussed