Faculty of Science and Technology

Title: Consistent cosmology with Higgs thermal inflation in a minimal extension of the MSSM

Abstract: This talk discusses a class of supersymmetric models of inflation, in which minimal gauged F-term hybrid inflation is coupled renormalisably to the minimal supersymmetric standard model (MSSM), with no extra ingredients; we call this class the "minimal hybrid inflationary supersymmetric standard model" (MHISSM). This constitutes a minimal extension of the MSSM which has the ingredients for a satisfactory cosmology, including explanations for inflation, dark matter, neutrino masses and baryogenesis. Such models can exit inflation to a vacuum characterised by large Higgs vevs, whose vacuum energy is controlled by supersymmetry-breaking. Given an unstable large-Higgs vacuum, the true ground state is reached after a period of thermal inflation at a scale of around $10^9$ GeV, which solves several cosmological problems of the F-term inflation scenario.