A Susy Phase Transition as Central Engine

For several decades the energy source powering supernovae and gamma ray bursts has been a troubling mystery. Many articles on these phenomena have been content to model the consequences of an unknown "central engine" depositing a large amount of energy in a small region. In the case of supernovae this is somewhat unsettling since the type 1a supernovae are assumed to be "standardizable candles" from which important information concerning the dark energy can be derived. It should be expected that a more detailed understanding of supernovae dynamics could lead to a reduction of the errors in this relationship. Similarly, the current state of the standard model theory of gamma ray bursts, which in some cases have been associated with supernovae, has conceptual gaps not only in the central engine but also in the mechanism for jet collimation and the lack of baryon loading. We discuss here the Supersymmetric (susy) phase transition model for the central engine.Comment: 18 pages including 9 figures. Based on a talk presented at the Fermilab conference, "Fundamental Physics from Clusters of Galaxies", December 9-11, 200

Phase Transition to Exact Susy

The anthropic principle is based on the observation that, within narrow bounds, the laws of physics are such as to have allowed the evolution of life. The string theoretic approach to understanding this observation is based on the expectation that the effective potential has an enormous number of local minima with different particle masses and perhaps totally different fundamental couplings and space time topology. The vast majority of these alternative universes are totally inhospitable to life, having, for example, vacuum energies near the natural (Planck) scale. The statistics, however, are assumed to be such that a few of these local minima (and not more) have a low enough vacuum energy and suitable other properties to support life. In the inflationary era, the "multiverse" made successive transitions between the available minima until arriving at our current state of low vacuum energy. String theory, however, also suggests that the absolute minimum of the effective potential is exactly supersymmetric. Questions then arise as to why the inflationary era did not end by a transition to one of these, when will the universe make the phase transition to the exactly supersymmetric ground state, and what will be the properties of this final state.Comment: To appear in Proceedings of Susy06, the 14th International Conference on Supersymmetry and the Unification of Fundamental Interactions, Ed. Jonathon L. Feng, American Institute of Physics, 200

Metastable Aspects of Singlet Extended Higgs Models

It has long been known that the broken supersymmetric (susy) phase of the singlet extended susy higgs model (SESHM) is at best metastable and the ground states of the model have vanishing vacuum energy and are exactly supersymmetric. If the SESHM is confirmed at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), the numerical values of the parameters of the model have a bearing on key properties of the susy phase and might provide an estimate of the remaining time before a possible decay of our false vacuum. We provide some analysis of the model including a treatment of phases in the potential and soft higgs masses.Comment: 21 pages, 7 figures. Version with color plots available at http://www.bama.ua.edu/~lclavell/papers/metaCol.pd

Virtual Supersymmetric Corrections in e^+e^- Annihilation

Depending on their masses, Supersymmetric particles can affect various measurements in Z decay. Among these are the total width (or consequent extracted value of $\alpha_s$), enhancement or suppression of various flavors, and left-right and forward-backward asymmetries. The latter depend on squark mass splittings and are, therefore, a possible test of the Supergravity related predictions. We calculate leading order corrections for these quantities considering in particular the case of light photino and gluino where the SUSY effects are enhanced. In this limit the effect on $\alpha_s$ is appreciable, the effect on $R_b$ is small, and the effect on the asymmetries is extremely small.Comment: 11 pages, LaTeX, 3 figures, revised, a reference adde

Ionic Binding in a Susy Background

From string theory and the observation of a positive vacuum energy in our universe it seems inevitable that there will eventually be a phase transition to an exactly supersymmetric (susy) universe. In this phase there will be an effective weakening of the Pauli principle due to fermi-bose degeneracy. As a consequence molecular binding will be significantly affected. We make some general comments on susy molecules and perform a variational principle estimate of ionic binding energies.Comment: published version, 14 page