A. Kusenko et al., PHASE-TRANSITIONS AND VACUUM TUNNELING INTO CHARGE-BREAKING AND COLOR-BREAKING MINIMA IN THE MSSM, Physical review. D. Particles and fields, 54(9), 1996, pp. 5824-5834
The scalar potential of the MSSM may have local and global minima char
acterized by nonzero expectation values of charged and colored bosons.
Even if the true vacuum is not color and charge conserving, the early
Universe is likely to occupy the minimum of the potential in which on
ly the neutral Higgs fields have nonzero VEV's. The stability of this
false vacuum with respect to quantum tunneling imposes important const
raints on the values of the MSSM parameters. We analyze these constrai
nts using some novel methods for calculating the false vacuum decay ra
te. Some regions of the MSSM parameter space are ruled out because the
lifetime of the corresponding physically acceptable false vacuum is s
mall in comparison to the present age of the Universe. However, there
is a significant fraction of the parameter space that is consistent wi
th the hypothesis that the Universe rests in the false vacuum that is
stable on a cosmological time scale.