Metastable supersymmetry breaking and dynamical vacuum selection in intersecting brane systems.

摘要

In this thesis we study metastable supersymmetry breaking and dynamical vacuum selection in intersecting brane systems that are known to be useful for realizing supersymmetric gauge theories in string theory.;Metastable supersymmetry breaking configurations of D-branes and NS5-branes in string theory often owe their existence to classical gravitational interactions between the branes. We show that in the effective theory of the light fields, these interactions give rise to a non-canonical Kahler potential and other D-terms. String theory provides a UV completion in which these non-renormalizable terms can be computed. We use these observations to clarify the relation between the phase structure of ISS-type models and their brane realizations.;We then study dynamical vacuum selection in a system of D-branes localized near an intersection of Neveu-Schwarz fivebranes that is known to exhibit a rich landscape of supersymmetric and (metastable) supersymmetry breaking vacua. We show that early universe cosmology, in the form of excited fivebranes relaxing via Hawking radiation, drives the system to a particular long-lived supersymmetry breaking ground state.