Dimensionless supersymmetry breaking couplings, flat directions, and the origin of intermediate mass scales

TL;DR

This paper investigates how suppressed, dimensionless supersymmetry-breaking couplings influence flat directions and intermediate mass scales, providing insights into low-energy physics and model building.

Contribution

It introduces the role of dimensionless SUSY-breaking couplings in flat directions and explores their effects on vacuum expectation values and model phenomenology.

Findings

Dimensionless SUSY-breaking couplings can induce intermediate scale VEVs.

One-loop effective potential analysis reveals their impact on flat directions.

Applications include models with R-parity conservation and solutions to the  and axion problems.

Abstract

The effects of supersymmetry breaking are usually parameterized by soft couplings of positive mass dimensions. However, realistic models also predict the existence of suppressed, but non-vanishing, dimensionless supersymmetry-breaking couplings. These couplings are technically hard, but do not lead to disastrous quadratic divergences in scalar masses, and may be crucial for understanding low-energy physics. In particular, analytic scalar quartic couplings that break supersymmetry can lead to intermediate scale vacuum expectation values along nearly-flat directions. I study the one-loop effective potential for flat directions in the presence of dimensionless supersymmetry-breaking terms, and discuss the corresponding renormalization group equations. I discuss two applications: a minimal model of automatic R-parity conservation, and an extension of this minimal model which provides a solution to the \mu problem and an invisible axion.