Gravitational waves as a probe of SUSY scale

Understand

We investigate the sources of the Hubble-induced mass for a flat direction in supersymmetric theories and show that the sign of the Hubble-induced mass generally changes just after the end of inflation.

• This implies that global cosmic strings generally form after the end of inflation in most supersymmetric models, including the Minimal Supersymmetric Standard Model.
• The cosmic strings emit gravitational waves whose frequency corresponds to the Hubble scale, until they disappear when the Hubble parameter decreases down to the soft mass of the flat direction.
• As a result, the peak frequency of gravitational waves is related to the supersymmetric scale.