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Abstract:

The temperature fluctuations in the cosmic microwave background observed by COBE provide strong support for an inflationary phase in the early universe, below the GUT scale. We argue that a singlet field in a hidden sector of an effective supergravity theory yields the required inflationary potential without fine tuning. Reheating occurs to a temperature low enough to avoid the gravitino problem, but high enough to allow subsequent baryogenesis. Two observational consequences are that gravitational waves contribute negligibly to the microwave background anisotropy, and the spectrum of scalar density perturbations is `tilted', improving the fit to large-scale structure in an universe dominated by cold dark matter.

Abstract:

We discuss the domain wall problem in the Next-to-Minimal Supersymmetric Standard Model, with particular attention to the usual solution of explicit breaking of the discrete symmetry by non-renormalisable operators. This ``solution'' leads to a contradiction between the requirements of cosmology and those of avoiding the destabilisation of the hierarchy.