Paper detail

Soft Terms from Broken Symmetries

In theories of phyiscs beyond the Standard Model (SM), visible sector fields often carry quantum numbers under additional gauge symmetries. One could then imagine a scenario in which these extra gauge symmetries play a role in transmitting supersymmetry breaking from a hidden sector to the Supersymmetric Standard Model (SSM). In this paper we present a general formalism for studying the resulting hidden sectors and calculating the corresponding gauge mediated soft parameters. We find that a large class of generic models features a leading universal contribution to the soft scalar masses that only depends on the scale of Higgsing, even if the model is strongly coupled. As a by-product of our analysis, we elucidate some IR aspects of the correlation functions in General Gauge Mediation. We also discuss possible phenomenological applications.