0000000000953898
AUTHOR
Jisuke Kubo
Elimination of unitarily nonequivalent vacua in supersymmetric grand unified theories by gravity
Abstract In globally supersymmetric grand unified theories, there may be unitarily nonequivalent vacua which are not present in ordinary theories, reflecting the invariance of the Higgs potential under the complex extension of the gauge group. We show that such vacua are eliminated in the presence of N = 1 supergravity coupling, if local supersymmetry is broken and the costomological constant vanishes.
Renormalization-scheme ambiguity and perturbation theory near a fixed point
We consider the perturbative calculation of critical exponents in massless, renormalizable theories having a nontrivial fixed point. In conventional perturbation theory, all results depend on the arbitrary renormalization scheme used. We show how to resolve this problem, following the "principle of minimal sensitivity" approach. At least three orders of perturbation theory are required for quantitative results. We give scheme-independent criteria for determining the presence or absence of a fixed point in $n\mathrm{th}$ order, and discuss the conditions under which perturbative results might be reliable. As illustrations we discuss QED with many flavors, and ${({\ensuremath{\varphi}}^{4})}_…