Reheating metastable O’Raifeartaigh models

In theories with multiple vacua, reheating to a temperature greater than the height of a barrier can stimulate transitions from a desirable metastable vacuum to a lower energy state. We discuss the constraints this places on various theories and demonstrate that in a class of supersymmetric models this transition does not occur even for arbitrarily high reheating temperature.

Figure 1

Cartoon of the potential in the meson direction, for temperatures at, above, and below the critical temperature, $T_c^{\mathrm{susy}}$, here ${\eta }_{\mathrm{susy}}=({\mu }^2{\Lambda }^a{)}^{1/(2+a)}$. Also plotted is the square approximation to the potential used for calculating the bounce action.