Comments on General Gauge Mediation

TL;DR

This paper extends the understanding of general gauge mediation by providing a full effective potential for squark directions, generalizing soft masses, and connecting with superspace methods, with implications for cosmology and Higgsed gauge groups.

Contribution

It offers a simple extension of MSS results to include the full effective potential for squark directions and generalizes soft masses to Higgsed gauge groups, enhancing the theoretical framework.

Findings

Derived the full effective potential for squark pseudo-D-flat directions.

Generalized soft masses to include Higgsed gauge groups.

Connected gauge mediation results with superspace analytic continuation.

Abstract

There has been interest in generalizing models of gauge mediation of supersymmetry breaking. As shown by Meade, Seiberg, and Shih (MSS), the soft masses of general gauge mediation can be expressed in terms of the current two-point functions of the susy-breaking sector. We here give a simple extension of their result which provides, for general gauge mediation, the full effective potential for squark pseudo-D-flat directions. The effective potential reduces to the sfermion soft masses near the origin, and the full potential, away from the origin, can be useful for cosmological applications. We also generalize the soft masses and effective potential to allow for general gauge mediation by Higgsed gauge groups. Finally, we discuss general gauge mediation in the limit of small F-terms, and how the results of MSS connect with the analytic continuation in superspace results, based on a spurion analysis.