Topics in metastable supersymmetry breaking

Abstract

Supersymmetry helps simplifying the hierarchy problem, it provides candidates for dark matter and it leads to the desirable gauge coupling unification. Nevertheless, Supersymmetry is not found around us, and it has to be a broken symmetry. In this thesis we explore a different paradigm where supersymmetry is not broken in the true vacuum. Instead we live in a long living meta-stable vacuum that is not supersymmetric.