General Messenger Gauge Mediation

TL;DR

This paper presents a unified framework for gauge mediation theories with two weakly coupled sectors, providing insights into their predictions and establishing bounds on superpartner masses.

Contribution

It introduces a unifying framework for theories with two weakly coupled sectors in gauge mediation, encompassing all known messenger models and deriving positivity and mass ratio bounds.

Findings

Positivity of sfermion mass-squared in weakly-coupled messenger models

Lower bound on the ratio of sfermion to gaugino masses

Framework unifies various existing models

Abstract

We discuss theories of gauge mediation in which the hidden sector consists of two subsectors which are weakly coupled to each other. One sector is made up of messengers and the other breaks supersymmetry. Each sector by itself may be strongly coupled. We provide a unifying framework for such theories and discuss their predictions in different settings. We show how this framework incorporates all known models of messengers. In the case of weakly-coupled messengers interacting with spurions through the superpotential, we prove that the sfermion mass-squared is positive, and furthermore, that there is a lower bound on the ratio of the sfermion mass to the gaugino mass.