Mixing-induced Spontaneous Supersymmetry Breaking

TL;DR

The paper proposes and proves that flavor mixing can universally induce spontaneous supersymmetry breaking by shifting zero point energies of fermions and bosons, breaking supersymmetry despite symmetric mixing.

Contribution

It explicitly proves the conjecture for two Wess--Zumino supermultiplets and argues for its general applicability across supersymmetric models.

Findings

Mixing shifts fermionic and bosonic zero point energies positively.

The shift breaks supersymmetry despite symmetric treatment of fermions and bosons.

The mechanism is demonstrated explicitly in a specific model and argued to be universal.

Abstract

It is conjectured that flavor mixing furnishes a universal mechanism for the spontaneous breaking of supersymmetry. The conjecture is proved explicitly for the mixing of two Wess--Zumino $\mathcal{N}=1$ supermultiplets and arguments for its general validity are given. The mechanism relies on the fact that, despite mixing treats fermions and bosons symmetrically, both the fermionic and the bosonic zero point energies are shifted by a positive amount and this kind of shift does not respect supersymmetry.