The Role of Scalar and Pseudoscalar Fields in Determining Nucleosynthesis Bounds on the Scale of Supersymmetry Breaking

The effect of spin-0 goldstino superpartners is considered on the nucleosynthesis bounds arising when a superlight gravitino appears as an effective massless neutrino species. When the scalar and pseudoscalar superpartners are relativistic they will decouple at much later times than the goldstino and consequently will be the dominant effect when obtaining a nucleosynthesis bound on the scale of supersymmetry breaking. Assuming that the scalar and pseudoscalar fields decouple at a temperature no later than O(100) MeV, then typically the scale of supersymmetry breaking \sqrt{F} > 60 TeV. This corresponds to a lower bound on the gravitino mass m_{3/2} > 1 eV.Comment: 12 pages, 1 figure; Version to be published in Phys. Lett.

Superlight gravitinos in electron-photon collisions

Motivated by recent studies of supersymmetry in higher-dimensional spaces, we discuss the experimental signatures of a superlight gravitino, mass < 0.001 eV. We concentrate on the process (e- gamma -> selectronR gravitino) as a probe of supersymmetry, where a single heavy superpartner and a superlight gravitino are produced. The fact that there is only one heavy superpartner in the final state in this process would require a lower center-of-mass energy for on-shell production compared to conventional pair production. For instance, for a 500 GeV machine, we find that a positive signal will be found if the supersymmetry breaking scale is less than about 2 TeV. If no positive signal is found, this process puts a bound on the supersymmetry breaking scale.Comment: 8 pages Added 2 terms to eqn(3) for easy reference and other minor changes to improve clarit

A Soft-Wall Dilaton

We study the properties of the dilaton in a soft-wall background using two solutions of the Einstein equations. These solutions contain an asymptotically AdS metric with a nontrivial scalar profile that causes both the spontaneous breaking of conformal invariance and the generation of a mass gap in the particle spectrum. We first present an analytic solution, using the superpotential method, that describes a CFT spontaneously broken by a finite dimensional operator in which a light dilaton mode appears in the spectrum. This represents a tuning in the vanishing of the quartic coupling in the effective potential that could be naturally realised from an underlying supersymmetry. Instead, by considering a generalised analytic scalar bulk potential that quickly transitions at the condensate scale from a walking coupling in the UV to an order-one $\beta$-function in the IR, we obtain a naturally light dilaton. This provides a simple example for obtaining a naturally light dilaton from nearly-marginal CFT deformations in the more realistic case of a soft-wall background.Comment: 23 pages, 8 figures; v2: version published in JHE

Three generations on a local vortex in extra dimensions

We develop an approach to the origin of three generations of the Standard Model fermions from one generation in a higher-dimensional theory, where four-dimensional fermions appear as zero modes trapped in the core of a topological defect, and the hierarchy of masses and mixings is produced by wave function overlaps in extra dimensions. We present a model with unbroken U(1) symmetry where three zero modes appear on an Abrikosov-Nielsen-Olesen vortex due to nontrivial scalar--fermion interactions.Comment: 8 pages, no figure