Thesis (Ph. D.)--Florida State University, 2006. / Advisor: Howard Baer, Florida State University, College of Arts and Sciences, Dept. of Physics. Title and description from dissertation home page (viewed Sept. 22, 2006). Document formatted into pages; contains xiii, 132 pages. Includes bibliographical references.

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Firstly, scalar quark mass matrices are calculated for a non-minimal SU₅ N=l supergravity theory with realistic fermion masses. The squark mixing matrices, analogues of the Kobayashi-Maskawa matrices for quarks, are also calculated and have significant off-diagonal entries. Thus, there are non-zero flavour-changing gaugino interactions between 'up' quarks and 'up' squarks in the non-minimal model. This is in contrast to the case for minimal SU₅ . It is shown that in the non-minimal model flavour-changing gluino interactions contribute to the proton decay modes p → μ⁺K⁰, ῡ_μK⁺ at about the same rate as the mode p → ῡ_μK⁺ mediated by Wino exchange. Contributions to the K_L-K_S mass difference from flavour-changing gluino and wino interactions are small. Secondly, for a finite N=2 globally supersymmetric theory it is shown that the set of finiteness-preserving soft operators previously derived by Parkes and West is incomplete. The complete set of 1-loop finite operators is derived by a graphical analysis, and it is shown that most of these preserve finiteness to all orders. The low-energy N=2 model of Del Aguila et al. is reviewed, and it is shown that new constraints on the τ-neutrino mass require an unnaturally high scale of supersymmebry breaking in the model.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Northeastern University, 2009. / Title from title page (viewed June 22, 2009). Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, Dept. of Physics. Includes bibliographical references (p. 163-178).

This thesis is divided into three main parts. In the first of these (comprising chapters 1 and 2) we present the physical context of the research and cover the basic geometric background we will need to use throughout the rest of this thesis. In the second part (comprising chapters 3 to 5) we motivate and develop the strong homogeneity theorem for supergravity backgrounds. We go on to prove it directly for a number of top-dimensional Poincaré supergravities and furthermore demonstrate how it also generically applies to dimensional reductions of those theories. In the third part (comprising chapters 6 and 7) we show how further specialising to the case of symmetric backgrounds allows us to compute complete classifications of such backgrounds. We demonstrate this by classifying all symmetric type IIB supergravity backgrounds. Next we apply an algorithm for computing the supersymmetry of symmetric backgrounds and use this to classify all supersymmetric symmetric M-theory backgrounds.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Washington, 2006. / Vita. Includes bibliographical references (p. 81-85).