Brane worlds, brane worlds : it's party time : excellent

Abstract

In recent years branes have had significant impact in the construction of higher dimensional theories of SUSY breaking, and of gravitational phenomena. In particular they provide strong motivation for considering anomaly mediation as a mechanism of SUSY breaking communication. Anomaly mediation provides a very predictive spectrum for the superpartner masses, which is quite model independent, and is given in terms of the beta functions and anomalous dimensions of the fields. This spectrum is also largely flavor blind, and thus does not suffer from flavor changing neutral current problems. Anomaly mediation, however, predicts negative slepton mass squardes. In this thesis we will try to address this problem by providing positive contributions to the slepton masses, through higher order SUSY breaking effects stemming from having additional heavy fields in the theory. We will also provide natural values for the Au and B parameters of the MSSM. Branes also allow for the surprising possibility that we may be living in a world with infinite extra dimensions with minor observational consequences. In this dissertation we will show that the RS2 and LR models, which have a single infinite dimension, are completely consistent and conform nicely with current experiments. We will also comment on possible holographic interpretations of these models as having 4D gravity coupled to a fully quantum conformal field theory.