High Energy Theory Seminar

Anomaly mediation is a ubiquitous source of supersymmetry breaking which appears in almost every theory of supergravity. Despite its ubiquity, anomaly mediation has been the source of much theoretical confusion, and the goal of this talk is to demystify aspects of the underlying mechanism. I will show that anomaly mediation really consists of two physically distinct phenomena, which can be disentangled by measuring associated couplings to the goldstino. The most minimal version of anomaly mediation yields supersymmetry breaking soft masses without corresponding goldstino couplings, a result which naively violates the goldstino equivalence theorem. The absence of goldstino couplings is in fact necessary for supercurrent conservation, and we can use this to give an unambiguous definition of sequestering.