Cosmological constant in SUGRA models with Planck scale SUSY breaking and degenerate vacua

C.D Froggatt,R Nevzorov,H.B Nielsen,A.W Thomas

doi:10.1016/j.physletb.2014.08.027

Abstract

The empirical mass of the Higgs boson suggests small to vanishing values of the quartic Higgs self-coupling and the corresponding beta function at the Planck scale, leading to degenerate vacua. This leads us to suggest that the measured value of the cosmological constant can originate from supergravity (SUGRA) models with degenerate vacua. This scenario is realised if there are at least three exactly degenerate vacua. In the first vacuum, associated with the physical one, local supersymmetry (SUSY) is broken near the Planck scale while the breakdown of the SU(2)W×U(1)Y symmetry takes place at the electroweak (EW) scale. In the second vacuum local SUSY breaking is induced by gaugino condensation at a scale which is just slightly lower than ΛQCD in the physical vacuum. Finally, in the third vacuum local SUSY and EW symmetry are broken near the Planck scale.

Highlights

The observation of the Higgs boson with a mass around ∼125–126 GeV, announced by the ATLAS [1] and CMS [2] Collaborations at CERN, is an important step towards our understanding of the mechanism of the electroweak (EW) symmetry breaking
The results of our analysis indicate that the appropriate value of the cosmological constant in the second vacuum can be induced if ΛSQCD is rather close to ΛQCD, that is near the scale where the QCD interaction becomes strong in the physical vacuum
In this note, inspired by the observation that the mass of the recently discovered Higgs boson leads naturally to Eq (1) and degenerate vacua in the Standard Model, we have argued that SUGRA models with degenerate vacua can lead to a rather small dark energy density, as well as small values of λ(MPl) and βλ(MPl)

Summary

Introduction

The observation of the Higgs boson with a mass around ∼125–126 GeV, announced by the ATLAS [1] and CMS [2] Collaborations at CERN, is an important step towards our understanding of the mechanism of the electroweak (EW) symmetry breaking. The supersymmetry in the second vacuum can be broken dynamically when the SUSY gauge interaction becomes non-perturbative at the scale ΛSQCD, resulting in an exponentially suppressed value of the cosmological constant which is transferred to the physical vacuum by the assumed degeneracy [20,21]. In this paper we argue that both the tiny value of the dark energy density and the small values of λ(MPl) and βλ(MPl) can be incorporated into the (N = 1) SUGRA models with degenerate vacua This requires that SUSY is not broken too far below the Planck scale in the physical vacuum and that there exists a third vacuum, which has the same energy density as the physical and second vacuum.

SUGRA models with degenerate vacua

Cosmological constant and ΛQCD

Preserving the Higgs mass prediction

Conclusions