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Holographic gauge mediation via strongly coupled messengers

We consider a relative of semi-direct gauge mediation where the hidden sector exists at large 't Hooft coupling. Such scenarios can be difficult to describe using perturbative field theory methods but may fall into the class of holographic gauge mediation scenarios, meaning that they are amenable to the techniques of gauge/gravity duality. We use a recently found gravity solution to examine one such case where the hidden sector is a cascading gauge theory resulting in a confinement scale not much smaller than the messenger mass. In the original construction of holographic gauge mediation, as in other examples of semi-direct gauge mediation at strong coupling, the primary contributions to visible sector soft terms come from weakly coupled messenger mesons. In contrast to these examples, we describe the dual of a gauge theory where there are significant contributions from scales where the strongly coupled messenger quarks are the effective degrees of freedom. In this regime, the visible sector gaugino mass can be calculated entirely from holography.