Modulus-dominated SUSY-breaking soft terms in F-theory and their test at LHC

TL;DR

This paper investigates how modulus-dominated SUSY-breaking in F-theory models leads to specific soft term patterns, compatible with experimental constraints and testable at the LHC, emphasizing the phenomenological implications of intersecting 7-brane configurations.

Contribution

It identifies the class of F-theory models with modulus-dominated SUSY-breaking that produce distinctive, testable MSSM soft term patterns, especially from intersecting 7-brane configurations.

Findings

Only intersecting 7-brane configurations fit all experimental constraints.

The resulting MSSM spectrum is distinctive and LHC-testable.

The models naturally accommodate neutralino dark matter abundance.

Abstract

We study the general patterns of SUSY-breaking soft terms arising under the assumption of Kahler moduli dominated SUSY-breaking in string theory models. Insisting that all MSSM gauginos get masses at leading order and that the top Yukawa coupling is of order the gauge coupling constant identifies the class of viable models. These are models in which the SM fields live either in the bulk or at the intersection of local sets of Type IIB D7-branes or their F-theory relatives. General arguments allow us to compute the dependence of the Kahler metrics of MSSM fields on the local Kahler modulus of the brane configuration in the large moduli approximation. We illustrate this study in the case of toroidal/orbifold orientifolds but discuss how the findings generalize to the F-theory case which is more naturally compatible with coupling unification. Only three types of 7-brane configurations are possible, leading each of them to very constrained patterns of soft terms for the MSSM. We study their consistency with radiative electroweak symmetry breaking and other phenomenological constraints. We find that essentially only the configuration corresponding to intersecting 7-branes is compatible with all present experimental constraints and the desired abundance of neutralino dark matter. The obtained MSSM spectrum is very characteristic and could be tested at LHC. We also study the LHC reach for the discovery of this type of SUSY particle spectra.