Observing The Hidden Sector

We study the effects of renormalization due to hidden-sector dynamics on observable soft supersymmetry-breaking parameters in the minimal supersymmetric extension of the Standard Model (MSSM), under various hypotheses about their universality at a high input scale. We show that hidden-sector renormalization effects may induce the spurious appearance of unification of the scalar masses at some lower scale, as in mirage unification scenarios. We demonstrate in simple two-parameter models of the hidden-sector dynamics that the parameters may in principle be extracted from experimental measurements, rendering the hidden sector observable. We also discuss the ingredients that would be necessary to carry this programme out in practice.Comment: 38 pages, 13 figures, uses UApreprint.cls and subfigure.sty (included

Triviality and the (Supersymmetric) See-Saw

For the D=5 Majorana neutrino mass operator to have a see-saw ultraviolet completion that is viable up to the Planck scale, the see-saw scale is bounded above due to triviality limits on the see-saw couplings. For supersymmetric see-saw models, with realistic neutrino mass textures, we compare constraints on the see-saw scale from triviality bounds, with those arising from experimental limits on induced charged-lepton flavour violation, for both the CMSSM and for models with split supersymmetry.Comment: 27 pages, 7 figures, references adde

Lepton Flavour Violation in a Class of Lopsided SO(10) Models

A class of predictive SO(10) grand unified theories with highly asymmetric mass matrices, known as lopsided textures, has been developed to accommodate the observed mixing in the neutrino sector. The model class effectively determines the rate for charged lepton flavour violation, and in particular the branching ratio for $\mu -> e \gamma$, assuming that the supersymmetric GUT breaks directly to the constrained minimal supersymmetric standard model (CMSSM). We find that in light of the combined constraints on the CMSSM parameters from direct searches and from the WMAP satellite observations, the resulting predicted rate for $\mu -> e \gamma$ in this model class can be within the current experimental bounds for low $\tan \beta$, but that the next generation of $\mu -> e \gamma$ experiments would effectively rule out this model class if LFV is not detected.Comment: 23 page