Recent progress in realising dynamical supersymmetry breaking allows the construction of simple and calculable models of gauge mediation. We discuss the phenomenology of the particularly minimal case in which the mediation is direct, and show that th
ere are generic new and striking predictions. These include new particles with masses comparable to those of the Standard Model superpartners, associated with the pseudo-Goldstone modes of the dynamical SUSY breaking sector. Consequently there is an unavoidable departure from the MSSM. In addition the gaugino masses are typically significantly lighter than the sfermions, and their mass ratios can be different from the pattern dictated by the gauge couplings in standard (i.e. explicit) gauge mediation. We investigate these features in two distinct realisations of the dynamical SUSY breaking sector.
It is well-known that in scenarios with direct gauge mediation of supersymmetry breaking the messenger fields significantly affect the running of Standard Model couplings and introduce Landau poles which are difficult to avoid. This appears to remove
any possibility of a meaningful unification prediction and is often viewed as a strong argument against direct mediation. We propose two ways that Seiberg duality can circumvent this problem. In the first, which we call deflected-unification, the SUSY-breaking hidden sector is a magnetic theory which undergoes a duality to an electric phase, with fewer elementary degrees of freedom coupled to the MSSM. This changes the beta-functions of the MSSM gauge couplings so as to push their Landau poles above the unification scale. We show that this scenario is realised for recently suggested models of gauge mediation based on a metastable SCQD-type hidden sector directly coupled to MSSM. The second possibility, which we call dual-unification, begins with the observation that, if the mediating fields fall into complete SU(5) multiplets, then the MSSM+messengers exhibits a fake unification at unphysical values of the gauge couplings. We show that, in known examples of electric/magnetic duals, such a fake unification in the magnetic theory reflects a real unification in the electric theory. We therefore propose that the Standard Model could itself be a magnetic dual of some unknown electric theory in which the true unification takes place. This scenario maintains the unification prediction (and unification scale) even in the presence of Landau poles in the magnetic theory below the GUT scale. We further note that this dual realization of grand unification can explain why Nature appears to unify, but the proton does not decay.
Very recently in arXiv:0705.0303 Alday and Maldacena gave a string theory prescription for computing (all) planar amplitudes in N=4 supersymmetric gauge theory at strong coupling using the AdS/CFT correspondence. These amplitudes are determined by a
classical string solution and contain a universal exponential factor involving the action of the classical string. On the gauge theory side, expressions for perturbative amplitudes at strong coupling were previously proposed only for specific helicities of external particles -- the maximally helicity violating or MHV amplitudes. These follow from the exponential ansatz of Bern, Dixon and Smirnov for MHV amplitudes in N=4 SYM. In this paper we examine the amplitudes dependence on helicities and particle-types of external states. We consider the prefactor of string amplitudes and give arguments suggesting that the prefactor at strong coupling should be the same as the Yang-Mills tree-level amplitude for the same process. This implies that scattering amplitudes in N=4 SYM simplify dramatically in the strong coupling limit. It follows from our proposal that in this limit all (MHV and non-MHV) n-point amplitudes are given by the (known) tree-level Yang-Mills result times the helicity-independent (and particle-type-independent) universal exponential.
We consider the metastable N=1 QCD model of Intriligator, Seiberg and Shih (ISS), deformed by adding a baryon term to the superpotential. This simple deformation causes the spontaneous breaking of the approximate R-symmetry of the metastable vacuum.
We then gauge the flavour SU(5)_f and identify it with the parent gauge symmetry of the Standard Model (SM). This implements direct mediation of supersymmetry breaking without the need for an additional messenger sector. A reasonable choice of parameters leads to gaugino masses of the right order. Finally, we speculate that the entire ``ISS x SM model should be interpreted as a magnetic dual of an (unknown) asymptotically free theory.
