Geraldine Servant — Page 4

arXiv1999

Was the Electroweak Phase Transition Preceded by a Color-Broken Phase?

It has been suggested, in connection with electroweak baryogenesis in the Minimal Supersymmetric Standard Model (MSSM), that the right-handed top squark has a negative mass squared parameter, such that its field could condense prior to the electroweak phase transition (EWPT). Thus color and electric charge could have been broken just before the EWPT. Here we investigate whether the tunneling rate from the color-broken vacuum can ever be large enough for the EWPT to occur in this case. We find that, even when all parameters are adjusted to their most favorable values, the nucleation rate is many orders of magnitude too small. We conclude that, without additional physics beyond the MSSM, the answer to our title question is ``no.'' This gives constraints in the plane of the light stop mass versus parameters related to stop mixing. However it may be possible to get color breaking in extended models, such as those with R-parity violation.

hep-ph↗

arXiv1998

Numerical Study of Hawking Radiation Photosphere Formation around Microscopic Black Holes

Heckler has recently argued that the Hawking radiation emitted from microscopic black holes has sufficiently strong interactions above a certain critical temperature that it forms a photosphere, analogous to that of the sun. In this case, the visible radiation is much cooler than the central temperature at the Schwarzschild radius, in contrast to the naive expectation for the observable spectrum. We investigate these ideas more quantitatively by solving the Boltzmann equation using the test particle method. We confirm that at least two kinds of photospheres may form: a quark-gluon plasma for black holes of mass M_{BH} < 5 times 10^{14} g and an electron-positron-photon plasma for M_{BH} < 2 times 10^{12} g. The QCD photosphere extends from the black hole horizon to a distance of 0.2--4.0 fm for 10^9 g < M_{BH} < 5 10^{14} g, at which point quarks and gluons with average energy of order Λ_{QCD} hadronize. The QED photosphere starts at a distance of approximately 700 black hole radii and dissipates at about 400 fm, where the average energy of the emitted electrons, positrons and photons is inversely proportional to the black hole temperature, and significantly higher than was found by Heckler. The consequences of these photospheres for the cosmic diffuse gamma ray and antiproton backgrounds are discussed: bounds on the black hole contribution to the density of the universe are slightly weakened.

hep-ph↗