No Arabic abstract
Perturbative supersymmetry breaking on the landscape of string vacua is expected to favor large soft terms as a power-law or log distribution, but tempered by an anthropic veto of inappropriate vacua or vacua leading to too large a value for the derived weak scale -- a violation of the atomic principle. Indeed, scans of such vacua yield a statistical prediction for light Higgs boson mass m_h~ 125 GeV with sparticles (save possibly light higgsinos) typically beyond LHC reach. In contrast, models of dynamical SUSY breaking (DSB) -- with a hidden sector gauge coupling g^2 scanned uniformly -- lead to gaugino condensation and a uniform distribution of soft parameters on a log scale. Then soft terms are expected to be distributed as $m_{rm soft}^{-1}$ favoring small values. A scan of DSB soft terms generally leads to $m_hll 125$ GeV and sparticle masses usually below LHC limits. Thus, the DSB landscape scenario seems excluded from LHC search results. An alternative is that the exponential suppression of the weak scale is set anthropically on the landscape via the atomic principle.
We demonstrate that Dirac neutrino masses in the experimentally preferred range are generated within supersymmetric gauge extensions of the Standard Model with a generalized supersymmetry breaking sector. If the usual superpotential Yukawa couplings are forbidden by the additional gauge symmetry (such as a U(1)), effective Dirac mass terms involving the wrong Higgs field can arise either at tree level due to hard supersymmetry breaking fermion Yukawa couplings, or at one-loop due to nonanalytic or nonholomorphic soft supersymmetry breaking trilinear scalar couplings. As both of these operators are naturally suppressed in generic models of supersymmetry breaking, the resulting neutrino masses are naturally in the sub-eV range. The neutrino magnetic and electric dipole moments resulting from the radiative mechanism also vanish at one-loop order.
We explore calculable models with low-energy supersymmetry where the flavor hierarchy is generated by quark and lepton compositeness, and where the composites emerge from the same sector that dynamically breaks supersymmetry. The observed pattern of Standard Model fermion masses and mixings is obtained by identifying the various generations with composites of different dimension in the ultraviolet. These single-sector supersymmetry breaking models give rise to various spectra of soft masses which are, in many cases, quite distinct from what is commonly found in models of gauge or gravity mediation. In typical models which satisfy all flavor-changing neutral current constraints, both the first and second generation sparticles have masses of order 20 TeV, while the stop mass is near 1 TeV. In other cases, all sparticles obtain masses of order 1 TeV predominantly from gauge mediation, even though the first two generations are composite.
In the minimal supersymmetric extension of the Standard Model (MSSM), if the two Higgs doublets are lighter than some subset of the superpartners of the Standard Model particles, then it is possible to integrate out the heavy states to obtain an effective broken-supersymmetric low-energy Lagrangian. This Lagrangian can contain dimension-four gauge invariant Higgs interactions that violate supersymmetry (SUSY). The wrong-Higgs Yukawa couplings generated by one-loop radiative corrections are a well known example of this phenomenon. In this paper, we examine gauge invariant gaugino--higgsino--Higgs boson interactions that violate supersymmetry. Such wrong-Higgs gaugino couplings can be generated in models of gauge-mediated SUSY-breaking in which some of the messenger fields couple to the MSSM Higgs bosons. In regions of parameter space where the messenger scale is low and tan(beta) is large, these hard SUSY-breaking operators yield tan(beta)-enhanced corrections to tree-level supersymmetric relations in the chargino and neutralino sectors that can be as large as 20%. We demonstrate how physical observables in the chargino sector can be used to isolate the tan(beta)-enhanced effects derived from the wrong-Higgs gaugino operators.
An alternative to the conventional see-saw mechanism is proposed to explain the origin of small neutrino masses in supersymmetric theories. The masses and couplings of the right-handed neutrino field are suppressed by supersymmetry breaking, in a way similar to the suppression of the Higgs doublet mass, $mu$. New mechanisms for light Majorana, Dirac and sterile neutrinos arise, depending on the degree of suppression. Superpartner phenomenology is greatly altered by the presence of weak scale right-handed sneutrinos, which may have a coupling to a Higgs boson and a left-handed sneutrino. The sneutrino spectrum and couplings are quite unlike the conventional case - the lightest sneutrino can be the dark matter and predictions are given for event rates at upcoming halo dark matter direct detection experiments. Higgs decays and search strategies are changed. Copious Higgs production at hadron colliders can result from cascade decays of squarks and gluinos.
A recently proposed new mechanism of D-term triggered dynamical supersymmetry breaking is reviewed. Supersymmetry is dynamically broken by nonvanishing D-term vacuum expectation value, which is realized as a nontrivial solution of the gap equation in the self-consistent approximation as in the case of Nambu-Jona-Lasinio model and BCS superconductivity.