Testing cosmological supersymmetry breaking

Banks has proposed a relation between the scale of supersymmetry breaking a nd the cosmological constant in de Sitter space. His proposal has a natural extension to a general FRW cosmology, in which the supersymmetry breaking scale is related to the Hubble parameter. We study one consequence of such a relation, namely that coupling constants change as the universe evolves. We find that the most straightforward extension of Banks' proposal is disfa vored by experimental bounds on variation of the fine structure constant. ( C) 2001 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.