Supersymmetry breakdown via gaugino condensation in heterotic string theory can lead to models with a doubly suppressed gravitino mass. A TeV scale gravitino can emerge from a condensate as large as the grand unified scale. We analyze the properties of these models and discuss applications for particle physics and cosmology.
The N=1 supergravity coupled to chiral and Yang-Mills superfields is regarded as the ultraviolet theory of the supersymmetric Standard Model. The gravitino acquires a mass from the hidden sector and participate in mediating supersymmetry breaking to the visible sector. We consider the quantum effects of the gravitino and evaluate its contribution to the gaugino masses at one loop level, which turns out to be irrespective of the SM gauge couplings. Due to the universality of gravitino, its contribution to the gaugino masses can significantly modify the gaugino mass relations of other supersymme…
The hidden SU(5)' with one family, 10 and 5-bar, breaks supersymmetry dynamically. From the effective Lagrangian approach, we estimate the hidden sector gaugino candensation scale, the dilaton stabilization and the resulting gravitino mass. In some models, this gravitino mass can be smaller than the previous naive estimate. Then, it is possible to raise the SU(5)' confining scale above 10^{13} GeV.
The heavy sfermion scenario is naturally realized when supersymmetry breaking fields are charged under some symmetry or are composite fields. There, scalar partners of standard model fermions and the gravitino are as heavy as O(10-1000) TeV while gauginos are as heavy as O(1) TeV. The scenario is not only consistent with the observed higgs mass, but also is free from cosmological problems such as the Polonyi problem and the gravitino problem. In the scenario, gauginos are primary targets of experimental searches. In this thesis, we discuss gaugino masses in the heavy sfermion scenario. First, …
The physics of moduli fields is examined in the scenario where the gravitino is relatively heavy with mass of order 10 TeV, which is favored in view of the severe gravitino problem. The form of the moduli superpotential is shown to be determined, if one imposes a phenomenological requirement that no physical CP phase arise in gaugino masses from conformal anomaly mediation. This bottom-up approach allows only two types of superpotential, each of which can have its origins in a fundamental underlying theory such as superstring. One superpotential is the sum of an exponential and a constant, whi…
Supersymmetry breaking sectors generically have an approximate global U(1) $R$-symmetry. Thermal effects tend to restore the $R$-symmetry in the reheated early universe. We revisit the gravitino generation from the thermal plasma and we argue that an $R$-symmetric phase suppresses the gaugino masses and thereby the production of the helicity $\pm 1/2$ gravitino component. For reasonable values of the hidden sector parameters the gravitino can account for the dark matter of the universe with a relic abundance characterized by a remarkable insensitivity to the reheating temperature.
We study supersymmetry breaking by hidden-sector gaugino condensation in N=1 D=4 supergravity models with multiple dilaton-like moduli fields. Our work is motivated by Type I string theory, in which the low-energy effective Lagrangian can have different dilaton-like fields coupling to different sectors of the theory. We construct the effective Lagrangian for gaugino condensation and use it to compute the visible-sector gaugino masses. We find that the gaugino masses can be of order the gravitino mass, in stark contrast to heterotic string models with a single dilaton field.
We investigate gaugino condensation in the framework of the strongly coupled heterotic $E_8 \times E_8$ string (M--theory). Supersymmetry is broken in a hidden sector and gravitational interactions induce soft breaking parameters in the observable sector. The resulting soft masses are of order of the gravitino mass. The situation is similar to that in the weakly coupled $E_8 \times E_8$ theory with one important difference: we avoid the problem of small gaugino masses which are now comparable to the gravitino mass.
We propose a retrofitted gravity mediation model which alleviates the gravitino overproduction from decays of an inflaton and a supersymmetry breaking field. In the model, we introduce an approximate U(1) symmetry under which the supersymmetry breaking field is charged, although it is broken by a mass term of messenger fields to generate gaugino masses of order the weak scale. In a low-scale inflation model, we find regions in which the gravitino overproduction problem is avoided.
In type IIB large volume compactifications involving orientifolds of the Swiss-Cheese Calabi-Yau [11169] with a single mobile space-time filling D3-brane and stacks of D7-branes wrapping the "big" divisor (D_5) and supporting D7-brane fluxes, (i) using the toric data and GLSM techniques, we obtain the geometric Kaehler potential for D_5 in terms of genus-two Siegel theta functions; (ii) we show that as the D3-brane moves from a particular embedded non-singular elliptic curve to another one, it is possible to obtain 10^{12}GeV gravitino during the inflationary era as well as a TeV gravitino in …
In models of low-energy gauge mediation, the observed Higgs mass is in tension with the cosmological limit on the gravitino mass $m_{3/2} \lesssim 16$ eV. We present an alternative mediation mechanism of supersymmetry breaking via a $U(1)$ $D$-term with an $E_6$-inspired particle content, which we call "vector mediation". The gravitino mass can be in the eV range. The sfermion masses are at the 10 TeV scale, while gauginos around a TeV. This mechanism also greatly ameliorates the $μ$-problem.
We show a calculable example of stable supersymmetry (SUSY) breaking models with O(10) eV gravitino mass based on the combination of D-term gauge mediation and U(1)' mediation. A potential problem of the negative mass squared for the SUSY standard model (SSM) sfermions in the D-term gauge mediation is solved by the contribution from the U(1)' mediation. On the other hand, the splitting between the SSM gauginos and sfermions in the U(1)' mediation is circumvented by the contributions from the D-term gauge mediation. Since the U(1)' mediation does not introduce any new SUSY vacua, we achieve a c…
We point out that the inflaton spontaneously decays into any gauge bosons and gauginos via the super-Weyl, Kahler and sigma-model anomalies in supergravity, once the inflaton acquires a non-vanishing vacuum expectation value. In particular, in the dynamical supersymmetry breaking scenarios, the inflaton necessarily decays into the supersymmetry breaking sector, if the inflaton mass is larger than the dynamical scale. This generically causes the overproduction of the gravitinos, which severely constrains the inflation models.
The generic observable sector gaugino mass in the weakly-coupled heterotic string compactified to four dimensions by the Scherk-Schwarz scheme (together with hidden sector gaugino condensation inducing the super-Higgs effect with a vanishing cosmological constant) is shown to be non-zero at tree level, being of the order of the gravitino mass, modulo reasonable assumptions regarding the magnitude of the condensate and the Scherk-Schwarz mass parameters
We discuss gravitino production from reheating in models where the splitting between particle and sparticle masses can be larger than TeV, as naturally arising in the context of split supersymmetry. We show that such a production typically dominates over thermal contributions arising from the interactions of gauginos, squarks and sleptons. We constrain the supersymmetry breaking scale of the relevant sector for a given reheat temperature. However the situation changes when the gravitinos dominate the Universe and decay before nucleosynthesis. We briefly describe prospects for a successful bary…
If gaugino condensations occur in the early universe, domain walls are produced as a result of the spontaneous breaking of a discrete R symmetry. Those domain walls eventually annihilate with one another, producing the gravitational waves. We show that the gravitational waves can be a probe for measuring the gravitino mass, if the constant term in the superpotential is the relevant source of the discrete R symmetry breaking.
Based on the correspondence between the N = 1 superstring compactifications with fluxes and the N = 4 gauged supergravities, we study effective N = 1 four-dimensional supergravity potentials arising from fluxes and gaugino condensates in the framework of orbifold limits of (generalized) Calabi-Yau compactifications. We give examples in heterotic and type II orientifolds in which combined fluxes and condensates lead to vacua with small supersymmetry breaking scale. We clarify the respective roles of fluxes and condensates in supersymmetry breaking, and analyze the scaling properties of the grav…
We propose a new class of models with gauge mediated supersymmetry breaking, the cascade supersymmetry breaking. This class of models is consistent with the gravitino mass as low as O(1)eV without having suppressed gaugino masses, nor the Landau pole problems of the gauge coupling constants of the Standard Model below the scale of the grand unification. In particular, there is no supersymmetric vacuum in the vicinity of the supersymmetry breaking vacuum even for such a low gravitino mass. Thus, the model does not have a vacuum stability problem decaying into supersymmetric vacua.
We study moduli-dominated SUSY breaking within the framework of string models. This type of SUSY breaking in general leads to non-universal soft masses, i.e. soft scalar masses and gaugino masses. Further gauginos are lighter than sfermions. This non-universality has phenomenologically important implications. We investigate radiative electroweak symmetry breaking in the mass spectrum derived from moduli-dominated SUSY breaking, where the lightest chargino and neutralino are almost gauginos. Moreover, constraints from the branching ratio of $b \to s γ$ and the relic abundance of the LSP are als…
High-scale supersymmetry (SUSY) with a split spectrum has become increasingly interesting given the current experimental results. A SUSY scale above the weak scale could be naturally associated with a heavy unstable gravitino, whose decays populate the dark matter (DM) particles. In the mini-split scenario with gravitino at about the PeV scale and the lightest TeV scale neutralino being (a component of) DM, the requirement that the DM relic abundance resulting from gravitino decays does not overclose the Universe and satisfies the indirect detection constraints demand the reheating temperature…
The WW scattering into gravitino and gaugino is here investigated in the broken phase, by using both gauge and mass eigenstates. Differently from what is obtained for unbroken gauge symmetry, we find in the scattering amplitudes new structures, which can lead to violation of unitarity above a certain scale. This happens because, in the annihilation diagram, the longitudinal degrees of freedom in the propagator of the gauge bosons disappear from the amplitude, by virtue of the SUGRA vertex. We show that the longitudinal polarizations of the on-shell W become strongly interacting in the high ene…
Flux compactifications of string theory seem to require the presence of a fine-tuned constant in the superpotential. We discuss a scheme where this constant is replaced by a dynamical quantity which we argue to be a `continuous Chern--Simons term'. In such a scheme, the gaugino condensate generates the hierarchically small scale of supersymmetry breakdown rather than adjusting its size to a constant. A crucial ingredient is the appearance of the hierarchically small quantity exp(-<X>) which corresponds to the scale of gaugino condensation. Under rather general circumstances, this leads to a sc…
We study fermions, such as gravitinos and gauginos in supersymmetric theories, propagating in a five-dimensional bulk where the fifth dimension is an interval. We show the mass spectrum becomes independent from the Scherk-Schwarz parameter if the boundary mass terms obey a relation of alignment with the bulk supersymmetry breaking.
Several models of inflection point inflation with the volume modulus as the inflaton are investigated. Non-perturbative superpotentials containing two gaugino condensation terms or one such term with threshold corrections are considered. It is shown that the gravitino mass may be much smaller than the Hubble scale during inflation if at least one of the non-perturbative terms has a positive exponent. Higher order corrections to the Kahler potential have to be taken into account in such models. Those corrections are used to stabilize the potential in the axion direction in the vicinity of the i…
The weakly-coupled heterotic string is known to have problems of dilaton/moduli stabilization, supersymmetry breaking (by hidden-sector gaugino condensation), gauge coupling unification (or the Newton's constant), QCD axion, as well as cosmological problems. We study these problems by adopting the viewpoint that they arise mostly due to our limited calculational power, little knowledge of the vacuum structure, and an inappropriate treatment of gaugino condensation. It turns out that these problems can be solved or are much less severe after a more consistent and complete treatment. There are t…
As is well known, the gravitational degrees of freedom contained in $R+ζR^{2}$ (super)gravity lead to Starobinsky's potential, in a one-field setting for inflationary Cosmology that appears favored by Planck data. In this letter we discuss another interesting aspect of this model, related to gravitino production, with emphasis on the corresponding mass spectrum. Assuming that supersymmetry is broken at a very high scale, Super Heavy Gravitino Dark Matter (SHGDM) and Starobinsky's inflation can be coherently unified in a $R+ζR^{2}$ supergravity. Gravitinos are assumed to be the Lightest Supersy…
We construct a gauge-mediation model with a D-term supersymmetry (SUSY) breaking. R-symmetry breaking necessary for generating the SUSY standard-model gaugino masses is given by gaugino condensation of a strongly coupled gauge theory in the hidden sector. The energy scale of the strong dynamics of the hidden sector gauge theory should be around the messenger mass scale M, or otherwise perturbative calculations would be reliable and would lead to negative soft mass squared for squarks and sleptons. Thus, all the mass scales are controlled by a virtually single parameter, \sqrt{D}/M. This model …
In this paper we consider a set of soft supersymmetry breaking terms within the NMSSM which leads to a small hierarchy between the supersymmetry breaking scale and the electroweak scale. Specifically only the gaugino masses and the soft term in the Higgs sector are non-vanishing at the GUT scale. This pattern can be found in gaugino mediated models and in higher-dimensional orbifold GUTs. We study the phenomenology of this scenario and find different low energy spectra depending on the Yukawa coupling $λ$ of the NMSSM singlet. In particular, for low values of $λ$ the singlet is the lightest sc…
In a recent paper \cite{Acharya:2006ia} it was shown that in $M$ theory vacua without fluxes, all moduli are stabilized by the effective potential and a stable hierarchy is generated, consistent with standard gauge unification. This paper explains the results of \cite{Acharya:2006ia} in more detail and generalizes them, finding an essentially unique de Sitter (dS) vacuum under reasonable conditions. One of the main phenomenological consequences is a prediction which emerges from this entire class of vacua: namely gaugino masses are significantly suppressed relative to the gravitino mass. We al…
We consider the phenomenological consequences of fixing compactification moduli. In the simplest KKLT constructions, stabilization of internal dimensions is rather soft: weak scale masses for moduli are generated, and are of order m_σ~ m_{3/2}. As a consequence one obtains a pattern of soft supersymmetry breaking masses found in gravity and/or anomaly mediated supersymmetry breaking (AMSB) models. These models may lead to destabilization of internal dimensions in the early universe, unless the Hubble constant during inflation is very small. Fortunately, strong stabilization of compactified dim…
We study the origin of the supersymmetry breaking induced by the mediation of gravity and the radion multiplet from the hidden to the visible brane in the context of the N=2, D=5 supergravity compactified on S_1/Z_2 orbifolds. The soft supersymmetry breaking terms for scalar masses, trilinear scalar couplings and gaugino masses are calculated to leading order in the five dimensional Newton's constant k_5^2 and the gravitino mass m_{3/2}. These are finite and non-vanishing, with the scalar soft masses be non-tachyonic, and are all expressed in terms of the gravitino mass and the length scale R …
Motivated by our earlier paper \cite{am}, we discuss how the infamous gravitino problem has a natural built in solution within supersymmetry. Supersymmetry allows a large number of flat directions made up of {\it gauge invariant} combinations of squarks and sleptons. Out of many at least {\it one} generically obtains a large vacuum expectation value during inflation. Gauge bosons and Gauginos then obtain large masses by virtue of the Higgs mechanism. This makes the rate of thermalization after the end of inflation very small and as a result the Universe enters a {\it quasi-thermal phase} after…
We discuss the calculation of soft supersymmetry breaking terms in type IIB string theoretic models in the Large Volume Scenario (LVS). The suppression of FCNC gives a lower bound on the size of the compactification volume. This leads to soft terms which are strongly suppressed relative to the gravitino mass so that the dominant contribution to the gaugino masses comes from the Weyl anomaly. The other soft terms are essentially generated by the renormalization group running from the string scale to the TeV scale.
We point out that type I string theory in the presence of internal magnetic fields provides a concrete realization of split supersymmetry. To lowest order, gauginos are massless while squarks and sleptons are superheavy. We build such realistic U(3)xU(2)xU(1) models on stacks of magnetized D9-branes. Though not unified into a simple group, these theories preserve the successful supersymmetric relation of gauge couplings, as they start out with equal SU(3) and SU(2) couplings and the correct initial sin^2θ_W at the compactification scale of M_{GUT}\simeq 2x10^{16} GeV, and they have the minimal…
In the context of the field theory limit of superstrings, we consider an almost realistic model of supersymmetry breaking by gaugino condensation which includes, through nonperturbative corrections to the Kähler potential, dilaton stabilization at a value compatible with a weak coupling regime. Invariance under modular transformations is ensured through a Green-Schwarz term and string threshold corrections, which lead to moduli stabilization at the self-dual point. We are thus in a position to discuss several issues of physical relevance: gravitino, dilaton and moduli masses, axion, soft super…
In many moduli stabilization schemes in string theory, the scale of inflation appears to be of the same order as the scale of supersymmetry breaking. For low-scale supersymmetry breaking, therefore, the scale of inflation should also be low, unless this correlation is avoided in specific models. We explore such a low-scale inflationary scenario in a racetrack model with a single modulus in type IIB string theory. Inflation occurs near a point of inflection in the Kähler modulus potential. Obtaining acceptable cosmological density perturbations leads to the introduction of magnetized D7-branes …
We discuss the mediation of supersymmetry breaking from closed to open strings, extending and improving previous analysis of the authors in Nucl. Phys. B 695 (2004) 103 [hep-th/0403293]. In the general case, we find the absence of anomaly mediation around any perturbative string vacuum. When supersymmetry is broken by Scherk-Schwarz boundary conditions along a compactification interval perpendicular to a stack of D-branes, the gaugino acquires a mass at two loops that behaves as $m_{1/2}\sim g^4 m_{3/2}^3$ in string units, where $m_{3/2}$ is the gravitino mass and $g$ is the gauge coupling.
We show that in string theory or supergravity with supersymmetry breaking through combined F-terms and Fayet-Iliopoulos D-terms, the masses for charged scalars and fermions can be hierarchically split. The mass scale for the gauginos and higgsinos of the MSSM is controlled by the gravitino mass m_{3/2}, as usual, while the scalars get extra contributions from the D-terms of extra abelian U(1) factors, which can make them much heavier. The vanishing of the vacuum energy requires that their masses lie below {m_{3/2} M_{Pl}}^{1/2}, which for m_{3/2}=O(TeV) sets a bound of 10^{10-13} GeV. Thus, sc…
We have analyzed the interplay between Scherk-Schwarz supersymmetry breaking and general fermion (gaugino or gravitino) mass terms localized on the fixed point branes of the S^1/Z_2 orbifold. Analytic solutions for eigenfunctions and eigenvalues are found in all cases. All results are checked by numerical calculations that make use of regularized δ-functions. Odd and generically also even fermions are discontinuous at the brane fixed points, but in all cases the combination that couples to the brane is continuous. For CP-even brane mass terms supersymmetry restoration can take place when their…
A cardinal principle of any theory of spontaneous (${\cal N}=1$) supersymmetry breaking, is that the order parameter is a linear combination of the F and D terms. Also as long as the supersymmetry of the action is preserved at the quantum level, this principle should be valid after the appropriate corrections are incorporated into the Kaehler potential, the superpotential, and the gauge coupling functions that define the theory. The claim that in AMSB there is an extra term for the gaugino mass that is proportional to the gravitino mass, is then equivalent to the statement that quantum effects…
We study fermions, such as gravitinos and gauginos in supersymmetric theories, propagating in a five-dimensional bulk where the fifth dimensional component is assumed to be an interval. We show that the most general boundary condition at each endpoint of the interval is encoded in a single complex parameter representing a point in the Riemann sphere. Upon introducing a boundary mass term, the variational principle uniquely determines the boundary conditions and the bulk equations of motion. We show the mass spectrum becomes independent from the Scherk-Schwarz parameter for a suitable choice of…
We present the main features of the solution of the gravitino and dilatino Killing spinor equations derived in hep-th/0510176 and hep-th/0703143 which have led to the classification of geometric types of all type I backgrounds. We then apply these results to the supersymmetric backgrounds of the heterotic string. In particular, we solve the gaugino Killing spinor equation together with the other two Killing spinor equations of the theory. We also use our results to classify all supersymmetry conditions of ten-dimensional gauge theory.
By using the standard perturbation theory we study the mass as well as $θ$ parameter dependence of the Seiberg-Witten theory with $SU(2)$ gauge group, supplemented with a $N=1$ supersymmetric as well as a smaller nonsupersymmetric (e.g.) gaugino mass. Confinement persists at all values of the bare vacuum parameter $θ_{ph}$; as it is varied there is however a phase transition at $θ_{ph} =-π, π, 3π, \ldots$. At these values of $θ_{ph}$ the vacuum is doubly degenerate and CP invariance is spontaneously broken à la Dashen. Due to the instanton-induced renormalization effect the low energy effectiv…
This dissertation reviews some properties of the low-energy effective actions for six dimensional open-string models. The first chapter is a pedagogical introduction about supergravity theories. In the second chapter closed strings are analyzed, with particular emphasis on type IIB, whose orientifold projection, in order to build type-I models, is the subject of the third chapter. Original results are reported in chapters 4 and 5. In chapter 4 we describe the complete coupling of (1,0) six-dimensional supergravity to tensor, vector and hypermultiplets. The generalized Green-Schwarz mechanism i…
We study some conditions for the hierarchy $m_{3/2} << M_P$ to occur naturally in a generic effective supergravity theory. Absence of fine-tuning and perturbative calculability require that the effective potential has a sliding gravitino mass and vanishing cosmological constant, up to ${\cal O}(m_{3/2}^4)$ corrections. In particular, cancellation of quadratically divergent contributions to the one-loop effective potential should take place, including the `hidden sector' of the theory. We show that these conditions can be met in the effective supergravities derived from four-dimensional superst…