Patterns of Soft Masses from General Semi-Direct Gauge Mediation

TL;DR

This paper presents a general framework for semi-direct gauge mediation of supersymmetry breaking, showing that gaugino masses vanish at leading order while sfermion masses do not, and discusses combining this with other mediation methods.

Contribution

It provides a comprehensive formulation of semi-direct gauge mediation and proves the leading order behavior of MSSM gaugino and sfermion masses.

Findings

Gaugino masses vanish at leading order in this scheme.

Sfermion masses have a non-zero leading contribution.

The mechanism can be integrated with other mediation models.

Abstract

We give a general formulation of semi-direct gauge mediation of supersymmetry breaking where the messengers interact with the hidden sector only through a weakly gauged group. Using this general formulation, we provide an explicit proof that the MSSM gaugino masses are vanishing to leading order in the gauge couplings. On the other hand, the MSSM sfermion masses have, generically, a non-vanishing leading contribution. We discuss how such a mechanism can successfully be combined with other mediation schemes which give tachyonic sfermions, such as sequestered anomaly mediation and some direct gauge mediation models.