Abstract
JHEP 0907:046,2009 We introduce a new model, the Pyramid Scheme, of direct mediation of SUSY
breaking, which is compatible with the idea of Cosmological SUSY Breaking
(CSB). It uses the trinification scheme of grand unification and avoids
problems with Landau poles in standard model gauge couplings. It also avoids
problems, which have recently come to light, associated with rapid stellar
cooling due to emission of the pseudo Nambu-Goldstone Boson (PNGB) of
spontaneously broken hidden sector baryon number. With a certain pattern of
R-symmetry breaking masses, a pattern more or less required by CSB, the Pyramid
Scheme leads to a dark matter candidate that decays predominantly into leptons,
with cross sections compatible with a variety of recent observations. The dark
matter particle is not a thermal WIMP but a particle with new strong
interactions, produced in the late decay of some other scalar, perhaps the
superpartner of the QCD axion, with a reheat temperature in the TeV range. This
is compatible with a variety of scenarios for baryogenesis, including some
novel ones which exploit specific features of the Pyramid Scheme.