High Energy Theory Seminar

I will describe recent efforts to understand the mediation of supersymmetry breaking in stabilized compactifications of type IIB string theory. By geometrically separating the visible sector from the supersymmetry breaking effects one may hope to achieve sequestered supersymmetry breaking and much ameliorated constraints from bounds on flavor changing neutral currents. However, in this talk I will discuss how non-perturbative superpotential cross-couplings between the visible sector and the Kähler moduli may spoil sequestering and introduce a sensitivity to the global details of the compactification. As a simple example, I will describe the structure of these `de-sequestering’ operators for a class of visible sectors realized by D-branes probing an orbifold singularity, and I will discuss their importance in the KKLT and LVS moduli stabilization scenarios.