Extended Anomaly Mediation and New Physics at 10 TeV

TL;DR

This paper explores extensions to anomaly mediated supersymmetry breaking, showing that introducing physics at 10 TeV can resolve negative slepton mass issues and alter previous predictions.

Contribution

It demonstrates that the negative slepton mass problem in minimal anomaly mediation can be addressed by considering new physics at 10 TeV, challenging previous assumptions.

Findings

Negative slepton masses can be avoided with 10 TeV physics

Extensions include vector-like matter at 10 TeV and leptons in an SU(3) triplet

Anomaly mediation predictions are not robust without these extensions

Abstract

In the MSSM, an unfortunate prediction of minimal anomaly mediated supersymmetry breaking is that the slepton masses squared are negative. This problem is particularly intractable because of the insensitivity of anomaly mediation to ultraviolet physics. In this paper we note that tree level couplings to the conformal compensator in the Kahler potential give 10 TeV as a natural mass scale for physics beyond the MSSM, and, moreover, that the SUSY breaking effects from physics at this scale do not generically decouple from the low-energy spectrum. We consider particular extensions, including the effects of vector-like matter at 10 TeV, and a specific model in which the leptons are placed in a triplet of an asymptotically free SU(3). We find that the features of minimal anomaly mediation are not a robust prediction of the general framework, and that the problem of negative slepton masses squared can easily be avoided.