Higgs thermal inflation and low energy supersymmetry

by Prof. D.R.T. Jones (University of Liverpool)

Friday 3 May 2013, 14:00 → 15:00 Europe/Paris

Room 149, Batiment 1

I discuss a class of supersymmetric models, in which the MSSM is coupled to minimal F-term inflation. This constitutes a minimal MSSM extension with the ingredients for a satisfactory cosmology, including explanations for inflation, dark matter, neutrino masses and baryogenesis. Such models can exit inflation to a vacuum characterised by large Higgs vevs, whose vacuum energy is controlled by supersymmetry breaking. Given an unstable large-Higgs vacuum, the true ground state is reached after a period of thermal inflation at a scale of around $10^9$ GeV, which solves several cosmological problems of the F-term inflation scenario.