Comments on Gaugino Screening

TL;DR

This paper explains the gaugino screening phenomenon in gauge mediated supersymmetry breaking models, showing how a counterterm cancels leading order gaugino mass contributions and reconciling different computational approaches.

Contribution

It provides a derivation of gaugino screening using the gaugino counterterm and demonstrates regulator independence through multiple regularization schemes.

Findings

Gaugino screening arises from a counterterm canceling leading order contributions.

The counterterm is present with non-zero messenger F-terms.

Results are consistent across dimensional reduction and Pauli-Villars regularizations.

Abstract

Gauge mediated models of supersymmetry breaking often exhibit "gaugino screening," where to leading order in F, gaugino masses are unaffected by higher dimensional Kahler potential interactions between the supersymmetry breaking spurion and the messengers. We provide a derivation of this phenomenon which utilizes the gaugino counterterm originally proposed in the context of anomaly mediation by Dine and Seiberg. We argue that this counterterm is present when there are non-zero messenger F-terms, and can cancel the leading order Feynman diagram contribution to the gaugino mass. We provide a nontrivial check of the regulator independence of our results by performing the computation using both dimensional reduction and Pauli-Villars. This analysis reconciles an apparent contradiction between diagrammatics and analytic continuation into superspace.