Topics within the string landscape and metastable supersymmetry breaking

Abstract

OF THE DISSERTATION Topics within the String Landscape and Metastable Supersymmetry Breaking by Korneel van den Broek Dissertation Director: Professor Thomas Banks In this thesis we focus on different aspects related to the central concept of the string landscape. We will first briefly situate the idea of the landscape within string theory and comment on its appealing and less appealing features. We then proceed to describe three projects which all take a different angle on the landscape. First we focus on a particular string compactification which is part of the landscape and analyze this background in detail. Secondly, we do a survey of the different compactification techniques and investigate which properties of the vacuummight lead to a long lived state. Thirdly, we discuss the idea of metastable dynamical supersymmetry breaking and the computer package VScape which was developed to assist in finding metastable states of supersymmetric models.