The SUSY World

Summary Talk of the Workshop `Properties of SUSY particles' Erice, September 28 -- October 4, 1992.Comment: 23 pages, 6 figures (not included), CERN-TH.6951/93, LATEX using worldsci.sty macro, hardcopy with figures can be sent via air-mail upon reques

Quantum corrections to broken N=8 supergravity

The discovery of the Higgs boson and the non-discovery (so far) of additional particles at the TeV scale underline our poor understanding of the hierarchy problems in the physics of the fundamental interactions. Loosely motivated by this consideration, I review some recent results on the classical and quantum stability of Minkowski vacua in spontaneously broken N=8 supergravity.Comment: 6 pages: contribution to the proceedings of ICHEP2012, The 36th International Conference on High Energy Physics, 4-11 July 2012, Melbourne, Australi

Theory Summary

Talk given at the XLVIII Rencontres de Moriond, Electroweak Interactions and Unified Theories, La Thuile, Italy, 2-9 March 2013, to appear in the Proceedings.Comment: 16 pages, 7 figure

Supersymmetry and gauge symmetry breaking with naturally vanishing vacuum energy

We review the construction of $N=1$ supergravity models where the Higgs and super-Higgs effects are simultaneously realized, with naturally vanishing classical vacuum energy and goldstino components along gauge-non-singlet directions: this situation is likely to occur in the effective theories of realistic string models. (Invited talk presented at SUSY--95, Palaiseau, France, 15--19 May 1995)Comment: plain LATEX, no figures, 11 page

Geometrical hierarchies in classical supergravity

We introduce a $N=1$ supergravity model with a very simple hidden sector coupled to the electroweak gauge and Higgs sectors of the MSSM. At the classical level, supersymmetry and $SU(2)\times U(1)$ are both spontaneously broken, with vanishing vacuum energy. Two real flat directions control the two symmetry-breaking scales $m_{3/2}$ and $m_Z$. The two massless scalars are a gauge singlet and the standard Higgs boson. All other unobserved particles have masses of order $m_{3/2}$. This may be a new starting point for studying the compatibility of naturalness with the observed mass hierarchies.Comment: 5 pages, no figure

Quantum corrections to broken N = 8 supergravity

We show that the one-loop effective potential of spontaneously broken N=8 supergravity is calculable and finite at all classical four-dimensional Minkowski vacua without tachyons in the spectrum. The reason is that the supertraces of the quadratic and quartic mass matrices vanish along the classically flat directions: Str M^2 = Str M^4 =0. We also show that Str M^6 = 0 but Str M^8 > 0 in a broad class of vacua with broken supersymmetry on a flat background, which includes all those explicitly identified so far. We find analytical and numerical evidence that the corresponding one-loop effective potential is negative-definite.Comment: 30 pages. v2: few misprints corrected. v3: JHEP published versio

A new class of N=1 no-scale supergravity models

We introduce a new N=1 no-scale supergravity model with F- and D-term breaking. It contains a single chiral supermultiplet T and a single U(1) vector multiplet U, gauging an axionic shift symmetry. Both supersymmetry and the gauge symmetry are spontaneously broken, with the spin-3/2, spin-1 and spin-1/2 masses sliding along a classical flat direction, with a single real massless scalar in the spectrum. The other degrees of freedom are absorbed by the massive gravitino and vector. We extend our model, under very mild conditions, to general gauge groups and matter content.Comment: 4 pages, RevTeX. Version to be published in PR

On sgoldstino-less supergravity models of inflation

We go a step further in the search for a consistent and realistic supergravity model of large-field inflation by building a class of models with the following features: during slow-roll, all the scalar fields other than the inflaton are frozen by large inflaton-dependent masses or removed from the spectrum; at the end of inflation, supersymmetry is spontaneously broken with naturally vanishing classical vacuum energy. We achieve this by combining some geometrical properties of the Kaehler potential with the consistent use of a single nilpotent chiral superfield, in one-to-one correspondence with the supersymmetry-breaking direction in field space at the vacuum.Comment: 19 pages. v2: references added and few minor changes to the text. v3: published versio

Beyond Twisted Tori

Exploiting the fact that Kaluza-Klein monopoles and the associated generalized orbifold planes are sources for geometrical fluxes, omega, we show that the standard constraint omega.omega=0, valid for superstring compactifications on twisted tori, can be consistently relaxed. This leads to novel possibilities for constructing superstring models with fluxes and localized sources, as well as for stabilizing moduli. This also explains the ten-dimensional origin of a family of N=4 gauged supergravities, whose interpretation in type-IIA orientifold compactifications was lacking.Comment: 12 page

Higgs Boson Properties in the Standard Model and its Supersymmetric Extensions

We review the realization of the Brout-Englert-Higgs mechanism in the electroweak theory and describe the experimental and theoretical constraints on the mass of the single Higgs boson expected in the minimal Standard Model. We also discuss the couplings of this Higgs boson and its possible decay modes as functions of its unknown mass. We then review the structure of the Higgs sector in the minimal supersymmetric extension of the Standard Model (MSSM), noting the importance of loop corrections to the masses of its five physical Higgs bosons. Finally, we discuss some non-minimal models.Comment: To be published in "Search of the Higgs Particle", Comptes Rendus de l'Academie des Sciences, Franc