Paper detail

Superconformally Covariant OPE and General Gauge Mediation

We consider using broken superconformal symmetry and the super operator product expansion (sOPE) to constrain and analyze hidden sector theories that couple to our gauge forces and are not necessarily weakly coupled. Conformal and supersymmetry breaking are IR effects, associated with field or spurion expectation values, whereas the sOPE is determined in the UV and hence does not notice the breaking. The broken superconformal symmetry relates OPE coefficients of superconformal descendant operators to those of the superconformal primaries. We apply these ideas to the current correlators of general gauge mediation (GGM). We also consider analyticity properties of these correlators, e.g. their discontinuities, and use the optical theorem to relate them to total scattering cross sections from visible to hidden sector states, e.g. sigma(vis + vis --> hidden), analogous to sigma(e+ e- --> hadrons) in QCD. We discuss how the current-current OPE can be truncated to the first few terms to get a good approximation to the visible sector soft masses of GGM.