No Arabic abstract
In global supersymmetric Wess-Zumino models with minimal Kahler potentials, F-type supersymmetry breaking always yields instability or continuous degeneracy of non-supersymmetric vacua. As a generalization of the original ORaifeartaighs result, the existence of instability or degeneracy is true to any higher order corrections at tree level for models even with non-renormalizable superpotentials. The degeneracy generically coincides the R-axion direction under some assumptions of R-charge assignment, but generally requires neither R-symmetries nor any assumption of generic superpotentials. The result also confirms the well-known fact that tree level supersymmetry breaking is a very rare occurrence in global supersymmetric theories with minimal Kahler potentials. The implication for effective field theory method in the landscape is discussed and we point out that choosing models with minimal Kahler potentials may result in unexpected answers to the vacuum statistics. Supergravity theories or theories with non-minimal Kahler potentials in general do not suffer from the existence of instability or degeneracy. But very strong gauge dynamics or small compactification dimension reduces the Kahler potential from non-minimal to minimal, and gravity decoupling limit reduces supergravity to global supersymmetry. Instability or degeneracy may appear in these limits. Away from these limits, a large number of non-SUSY vacua may still be found in an intermediate region.
The heterotic--string models in the free fermionic formulation gave rise to some of the most realistic string models to date, which possess N=1 spacetime supersymmetry. Lack of evidence for supersymmetry at the LHC instigated recent interest in non-supersymmetric heterotic-string vacua. We explore what may be learned in this context from the quasi--realistic free fermionic models. We show that constructions with a low number of families give rise to proliferation of a priori tachyon producing sectors, compared to the non--realistic examples, which typically may contain only one such sector. The reason being that in the realistic cases the internal six dimensional space is fragmented into smaller units. We present one example of a quasi--realistic, non--supersymmetric, non--tachyonic, heterotic--string vacuum and compare the structure of its massless spectrum to the corresponding supersymmetric vacuum. While in some sectors supersymmetry is broken explicitly, i.e. the bosonic and fermionic sectors produce massless and massive states, other sectors, and in particular those leading to the chiral families, continue to exhibit fermi-bose degeneracy. In these sectors the massless spectrum, as compared to the supersymmetric cases, will only differ in some local or global U(1) charges. We discuss the conditions for obtaining $n_b=n_f$ at the massless level in these models. Our example model contains an anomalous U(1) symmetry, which generates a tadpole diagram at one loop-order in string perturbation theory. We speculate that this tadpole diagram may cancel the corresponding diagram generated by the one-loop non-vanishing vacuum energy and that in this respect the supersymmetric and non-supersymmetric vacua should be regarded on equal footing. Finally we discuss vacua that contain two supersymmetry generating sectors.
We provide explicit formulas for the number of vacua of four-dimensional pure N=1 super Yang-Mills theories on a circle, with any simple gauge algebra and any choice of center and spectrum of line operators. These form a key ingredient in the semi-classical calculation of the number of massive vacua of N=1* gauge theories with gauge algebra su(n) compactified on a circle. Using arithmetic, we express that number in an SL(2,Z) duality invariant manner. We confirm our tally of massive vacua of the N=1* theories by a count of inequivalent extrema of the exact superpotential. Furthermore, we compute a formula for a refined index that distinguishes massive vacua according to their unbroken discrete gauge group.
In recent times, a considerable effort has been dedicated to identify certain conditions -- the so-called swampland conjectures -- with an eye on identifying effective theories which have no consistent UV-completions in string theory. In this paper, we examine the anti-de Sitter vacua corresponding to solutions which arise from purely non-perturbative contributions to the superpotential and show that these solutions satisfy the (axionic) weak gravity conjecture and the AdS-moduli scale separation conjecture. We also sketch out their advantages over other constructions.
We investigate supersymmetry breaking meta-stable vacua in N=2, SU(2)times U(1) gauge theory with N_f=2 massless flavors perturbed by the addition of small N=1 preserving mass terms in a presence of a Fayet-Iliopoulos term. We derive the low energy effective theory by using the exact results of N=2 supersymmetric QCD and examine the effective potential. At the classical level, the theory has supersymmetric vacua on Coulomb and Higgs branches. We find that supersymmetry on the Coulomb branch is dynamically broken as a consequence of the strong dynamics of SU(2) gauge symmetry while the supersymmetric vacuum on the Higgs branch remains. We also estimate the lifetimes of the local minima on the Coulomb branch. We find that they are sufficiently long and therefore the local vacua we find are meta-stable.
We propose to sharpen the weak gravity conjecture by the statement that, except for BPS states in a supersymmetric theory, the gravitational force is strictly weaker than any electric force and provide a number of evidences for this statement. Our conjecture implies that any non-supersymmetric anti-de Sitter vacuum supported by fluxes must be unstable, as is the case for all known attempts at such holographic constructions.