What is the SUSY mass scale?

Abstract

The energy, or mass scale M_SUSY, of the supersymmetry (SUSY) phase transition is, as yet, unknown. If it is very high (i.e., ~ 10^3 GeV), terrestrial accelerators will not be able to measure it. We determine M_SUSY here by combining theory with the cosmic microwave background (CMB) data. Starobinsky suggested an inflationary cosmological scenario in which inflation is driven by quantum corrections to the vacuum Einstein's equation. The modified Starobinsky model (MSM) is a natural extension of this. In the MSM, the quantum corrections are the quantum fluctuations of the supersymetric (SUSY) particles, whose particle content creates inflation and whose masses terminate it. Since the MSM is difficult to solve until the end of the inflation period, we assume here that an effective inflaton potential (EIP) that reproduces the time dependence of the cosmological scale factor of the MSM can be used to make predictions for the MSM. We predict the SUSY mass scale to be M_SUSY ~ 10^15 GeV, thus satisfying the requirement that the predicted density fluctuations of the MSM be in agreement with the observed CMB data.