Cosmology, GUTs, Strings, and the Pentagon

The Pentagon Model is an explicit supersymmetric extension of the Standard Model, which involves a new strongly-interacting SU(5) gauge theory at TeV-scale energies. We explore extensions of the Pentagon model in the contexts of cosmology, grand unied theory, and string theory: (i) We present a new mechanism for baryogenesis, which links the baryon asymmetry of the universe to the dark matter density. (ii) We show that the Pentagon can be embedded into an SU(5) x SU(5) x SU(5) gauge group at the GUT scale. The doublet-triplet splitting problem, and proton decay compatible with experimental bounds, can be successfully addressed in this context. (iii) We discuss embeddings into string theory, specically N = 1 supersymmetric type IIa intersecting D-brane models, M-theory compactications of G2 holonomy, and heterotic orbifold constructions.