Cosmological SUSY Breaking and the Pyramid Scheme

title: Regulating Eternal Inflation
abstract: We present an interpretation of the physics of space-times undergoing eternal inflation by repeated nucleation of bubbles. In many cases the physics can be interpreted in terms of the quantum mechanics of a system with a finite number of states. If this interpretation is correct, the conventional picture of these space-times is misleading.

title: Heretics of the False Vacuum: Gravitational Effects On and Of Vacuum Decay 2
abstract: This paper reexamines the question of vacuum decay in theories of quantum gravity. In particular it suggests that decay into stable flat or AdS vacua, never occurs. Instead, vacuum decay occurs, if at all, into a cosmological spacetime. If the latter has negative cosmological constant, it undergoes a Big Crunch, which suggests that the whole picture is inconsistent. The question of decay of de Sitter space must be very carefully defined.

title: Cosmological Breaking of Supersymmetry?
abstract: It is conjectured that M-theory in asymptotically flat spacetime must be supersymmetric, and that the observed SUSY breaking in the low energy world must be attributed to the existence of a nonzero cosmological constant. This would be consistent with experiment, if the {\it critical exponent} $\alpha$ in the relation $M_{SUSY} \sim M_P (\Lambda /M_P^4)^{\alpha}$ took on the value 1/8, rather than its classical value 1/4. We attribute this large renormalization to the effect of large virtual black holes via the UV/IR correspondence.

title: Landskepticism: or Why Effective Potentials Don't Count String Models
abstract: This paper is a synthesis of talks I gave at the Cargese Workshop in June 2004 and the Munich Conference on Superstring Vacua in November 2004. I present arguments which show that the landscape of string theory is not a well established feature of the theory, as well as a brief discussion of the phenomenological prospects of the landscape and the use of the anthropic principle.

title: Modular cosmology.
abstract: We begin a study of the cosmology of moduli in string theory. The quantum field theory requirement of " naturality " is shown to be incompatible with slow roll inflationary cosmology unless very stringent constraints are satisfied. In most cases, these constraints imply the existence of fields with the properties of string moduli: they must have only nonrenormalizable couplings to light fields and their natural range of variation must be the Planck scale. The scale which characterizes their potential energy (the inflation scale) must be two to three orders of magnitude smaller than the Planck mass in order to explain the observed magnitude of the fluctuations in the cosmic microwave background. Even if these constraints are satisfied, generic initial conditions near the Plank energy density do not lead to inflation unless the theory contains topological defects. In this case inflation can arise naturally at the cores of the defects. We show that string theory has two generic types of domain walls which could be the seeds for inflation, and argue that modular physics provides a very robust model of inflation. Two scenarios are presented to explain the discrepancy between the inflation scale and the scale of supersymmetry (SUSY) breaking. One of them is favored because it leads to a natural understanding of why the dilaton does not run out to the weak coupling region in the postinflationary period February 1995 1.  The existing versions of superstring theory all contain high dimension manifolds of degenerate ground states. As a consequence, string theory contains massless fields which move on these ground state manifolds as functions of space and time. For supersymmetric ground states, the degeneracy is not lifted in perturbation theory and these massless moduli fields remain massless to all orders in perturbation theory. It is quite clear that nature does not contain such massless scalar fields, and so one must hope that nonperturbative physics lifts the moduli masses up to an acceptable energy scale. It is an implicit assumption of all work on string theory that this occurs. Generally it is also assumed that the dynamics responsible for the masses of the moduli is connected with the dynamical breakdown of space time supersymmetry which must occur if string theory is to describe the real world. Among the many moduli one, the dilaton, is of special interest because it controls the string coupling. General arguments[1] show that it cannot be stabilized …

title: The CUORICINO and CUORE neutrinoless double beta decay experiments

title: Partial radiogenic heat model for Earth revealed by geoneutrino measurements
abstract: The Earth has cooled since its formation, yet the decay of radiogenic isotopes, and in particular uranium, thorium and 
potassium, in the planet’s interior provides a continuing heat source. The current total heat flux from the Earth to space is 44:2±1.0 TW, but the relative contributions from residual primordial heat and radiogenic decay remain uncertain. However, radiogenic decay can be estimated from the flux of geoneutrinos, electrically neutral particles that are emitted during radioactive decay and can pass through the Earth virtually unaffected. Here we combine precise measurements of the geoneutrino flux from the Kamioka Liquid-Scintillator Antineutrino Detector, Japan, with existing measurements from the Borexino detector, Italy.We find that decay of uranium-238 and thorium-232 together contribute 20.0^(+8.8)_(-8.6)TW to Earth’s heat 
flux. The neutrinos emitted from the decay of potassium-40 are below the limits of detection in our experiments, but are known to contribute 4TW. Taken together, our observations indicate that heat from radioactive decay contributes about half of Earth’s total heat flux. We therefore conclude that Earth’s primordial heat supply has not yet been exhausted.

title: Search for 14.4 keV solar axions from M1 transition of Fe-57 with CUORE crystals
abstract: We report the results of a search for axions from the 14.4 keV M1 transition from Fe-57 in the core of the sun using the axio-electric effect in TeO2 bolometers. The detectors are 5x5x5 cm(3) crystals operated at about 10 mK in a facility used to test bolometers for the CUORE experiment at the Laboratori Nazionali del Gran Sasso in Italy. An analysis of 43.65 kg.d of data was made using a newly developed low energy trigger which was optimized to reduce the energy threshold of the detector. An upper limit of 0.58 c.kg(-1).d(-1) is established at 95% C.L., which translates into lower bounds f(A) >= 3.12 x 10(5) GeV 95% C.L. (DFSZ model) and f(A) >= 2.41 x 10(4) GeV 95% C.L. (KSVZ model) on the Peccei-Quinn symmetry-breaking scale, for a value of S = 0.5 of the flavor-singlet axial vector matrix element. These bounds can be expressed in terms of axion masses as m(A) <= 19.2 eV and m(A) <= 250 eV at 95% C.L. in the DFSZ and KSVZ models respectively. Bounds are given also for the interval 0.35 <= S <= 0.55.

title: ODYSSEUS: description of and results from a strong-strong beam-beam simulation for storage rings
abstract: ODYSSEUS is a simulation of the beam-beam interaction in e/sup +/e/sup -/ storage ring colliders which is specifically intended to reveal the dynamic collective behavior of the colliding beams. This program is a true six-dimensional strong-strong simulation in which the electromagnetic fields of longitudinal slices of the colliding beams are recalculated for each slice collision. Broadband wake fields are included. No constraints are placed on the distribution of particles in the beams. The program achieves its speed through adaptively choosing between alternative electromagnetic field calculation methods. Benchmarking tests and various results are presented.

title: CUORE crystal validation runs: Results on radioactive contamination and extrapolation to CUORE background
abstract: The CUORE Crystal Validation Runs (CCVRs) have been carried out since the end of 2008 at the Gran Sasso National Laboratories, in order to test the performance and the radiopurity of the TeO2 crystals produced at SICCAS (Shanghai Institute of Ceramics, Chinese Academy of Sciences) for the CUORE experiment. In this work the results of the first 5 validation runs are presented. Results have been obtained for bulk contaminations and surface contaminations from several nuclides. An extrapolation to the CUORE background has been performed.