Topological Masses From Broken Supersymmetry

TL;DR

This paper develops a formalism to compute one-loop gravitational corrections to D-brane effective actions, revealing topological origins of induced fermion masses and their suppression in certain compactifications.

Contribution

It introduces a method to calculate gravitational corrections to fermion masses from closed string exchanges, highlighting topological effects and symmetry-induced cancellations.

Findings

Gravitational corrections to fermion masses are topologically derived.

In some models, corrections are suppressed exponentially due to symmetries.

Induced fermion masses scale as g^4 times the gravitino mass for small m_{3/2}.

Abstract

We develop a formalism for computing one-loop gravitational corrections to the effective action of D-branes. In particular, we study bulk to brane mediation of supersymmetry breaking in models where supersymmetry is broken at the tree-level in the closed string sector (bulk) by Scherk-Schwarz boundary conditions, while it is realized on a collection of D-branes in a linear or non-linear way. We compute the gravitational corrections to the fermion masses $m_{1/2}$ (gauginos or goldstino) induced from the exchange of closed strings, which are non-vanishing for world-sheets with Euler characteristic -1 (``genus 3/2'') due to a string diagram with one handle and one hole. We show that the corrections have a topological origin and that in general, for a small gravitino mass, the induced mass behaves as $m_{1/2}\propto g^4 m_{3/2}$, with $g$ the gauge coupling. In generic orbifold compactifications however, this leading term vanishes as a consequence of cancellations caused by discrete symmetries, and the remainder is exponentially suppressed by a factor of $\exp(-1/\alpha'm^2_{3/2})$.