Dynamical SUSY Breaking in Heterotic M-Theory

TL;DR

This paper demonstrates that certain hidden sectors in heterotic M-theory can realize metastable supersymmetry-breaking vacua in four-dimensional supersymmetric QCD with massive flavors, providing a potential mechanism for SUSY breaking.

Contribution

It constructs explicit metastable SUSY-breaking vacua in heterotic M-theory using gauge theories with massive flavors, applicable to various gauge groups.

Findings

Existence of long-lived metastable non-SUSY vacua.

Applicability to multiple gauge groups like Spin(Nc), SU(Nc), Sp(Nc).

Potential for SUSY breaking in heterotic M-theory hidden sectors.

Abstract

It is shown that four-dimensional N=1 supersymmetric QCD with massive flavors in the fundamental representation of the gauge group can be realized in the hidden sector of E8xE8 heterotic string vacua. The number of flavors can be chosen to lie in the range of validity of the free-magnetic dual, using which one can demonstrate the existence of long-lived meta-stable non-supersymmetric vacua. This is shown explicitly for the gauge group Spin(10), but the methods are applicable to Spin(Nc), SU(Nc) and Sp(Nc) for a wide range of color index Nc. Hidden sectors of this type can potentially be used as a mechanism to break supersymmetry within the context of heterotic M-theory.