Excited Q-Balls in the MSSM with gravity mediated supersymmetry breaking

Stable baryonic Q-balls, which appear in supersymmetric extensions of the Standard Model, could form at the end of cosmological inflation from fragmentation of the Affleck -- Dine condensate. We reconsider astrophysical constraints on such Q-balls as dark matter candidates. Baryonic Q-balls interact with matter by absorbing the baryon number and, effectively, leading to a rapid baryon number non-conservation. We have recently shown that this process can occur at a much faster...

Supersymmetric extensions of the standard model generically predict that in the early universe a scalar condensate can form and fragment into Q-balls before decaying. If the Q-balls dominate the energy density for some period of time, the relatively large fluctuations in their number density can lead to formation of primordial black holes (PBH). Other scalar fields, unrelated to supersymmetry, can play a similar role. For a general charged scalar field, this robust mechanism ...

Comparatively simple models, with low energy structure similar to that of the MSSM, but with far fewer arbitrary parameters, can be constructed in which supersymmetry is dynamically broken at low energies. The phenomenology of these models is somewhat different than that of the usual scenario with supersymmetry broken in a hidden sector.

In this letter we study the dynamics of the late Universe when a nonminimally coupled Higgs field is present. In general, the nonminimal coupling leads to a nontrivial mixing between the gravitational degrees of freedom and the Goldstone massless bosons. We know that this is irrelevant during the inflationary phase. In contrast, in the late Universe the nonminimal coupling affects the classical equations of motion, leading to an acceleration of the expansion rate or to a coll...

Non-perturbative preheating decay of post-inflationary condensates often results in a high density, low momenta, non-thermal gas. In the case where the non-perturbative classical evolution also leads to Q-balls, this effect shields them from instant dissociation, and may radically change the thermal history of the universe. For example, in a large class of inflationary scenarios, motivated by the MSSM and its embedding in string theory, the reheat temperature changes by a mul...

Future experiments may discover new scalar particles with global charges and couplings that allow for solitonic states. If the effective potential has flat directions, the scalar VEV inside a large Q-ball can exceed the particle mass by many orders of magnitude. Models with low-energy supersymmetry breaking generically have both the scalars carrying some global charges, and the flat directions. The Q-ball interior can, therefore, provide an environment for exploring physics f...

The cosmic abundance of a long-lived charged particle such as a stau is tightly constrained by the catalyzed big bang nucleosynthesis. One of the ways to evade the constraints is to dilute those particles by a huge entropy production. We evaluate the dilution factor in a case that non-relativistic matter dominates the energy density of the universe and decays with large entropy production. We find that large Q balls can do the job, which is naturally produced in the gauge-med...

Abelian non-topological solitons with Baryon and/or Lepton quantum numbers naturally appear in the spectrum of the minimal supersymmetric standard model. They arise as a consequence of the existence of flat directions in the potential lifted by non renormalizable operators and SUSY breaking. We examine the conditions that these operators should satisfy in order to ensure proton stability and present a realistic string model which fulfils these requirements. We further identif...

Theories with low-energy supersymmetry predict the existence of stable non-topological solitons, Q-balls, that can contribute to dark matter. We discuss the experimental signatures, methods of detection, and the present limits on such dark matter candidates.

We reinvestigate the scenario that the amount of the baryons and the gravitino dark matter is naturally explained by the decay of the Q balls in the gauge-mediated SUSY breaking. Equipped by the more correct decay rates into gravitinos and baryons recently derived, we find that the scenario with the direct production of the gravitino dark matter from the Q-ball decay works naturally.