Astroparticle physics signals beyond the Standard Model

Abstract

In this thesis two signals pointing beyond the Standard Model are discussed. The first signal is the presence of baryonic matter around us. The possibility of baryogenesis in the Minimal Supersymmetric Standard Model (MSSM) was studied. The bosonic part of the MSSM Lagrangian was put on the lattice. Finite temperature and zero temperature simulations were performed to find the jump of the Higgs length and the mass spectrum. The phase diagram of MSSM in the m_U^2 - T plane was determined. The properties of the bubble wall during the phase transition were also analyzed. The second signal that is discussed in this thesis comes from the observed cosmic rays. According to the so-called ''top-down'' scenarios, the highest energy cosmic rays can be the decay products of some metastable superheavy particle. Based on the clustering features of the detected events, first the source density was determined. Then the mass of the decaying superheavy particle was found which is in rough agreement with the grand unification scale. The lattice simulations of MSSM require a large amount of CPU time. A PC based supercomputer was built at the Eötvös University to solve this problem. The hardware and software architecture as well as the performance of the machine is discussed.