Musings

A while back, Intriligator, Seiberg, and Shih found a tractable example of metastable dynamical SUSY breaking in $\mathcal{N}=1$ SQCD with $N_c\lt N_f \lt \tfrac{3}{2}N_c$ flavours of massive quarks. This theory has $N_c$ supersymmetric vacua, at which the squark bilinear has an expectation value, $$\langle \tilde{Q}_i Q_j\rangle \sim (\Lambda^{3N_c-N_f}\det m)^{1/N_c} (m^{-1})_{i j}$$ where $m$ is the quark mass matrix (with eigenvalues $m_i$). But, for $m_i/\Lambda\ll 1$, the theory also has metastable nonsupersymmetric vacua whose properties can be reliably computed in the magnetic dual theory¹, which is infrared-free for this range of $N_f$.

More recently, Ooguri and Ookouchi performed a similar analysis for the $\mathcal{N}=1$ $U(N_1)\times U(N_2)$ quiver gauge theory with bifundamental “quarks”, $Q,\tilde{Q}$, adjoint chiral multiplets, $X_1,X_2$ and a superpotential $$W= W_1(X_1) + W_2(X_2) + \tr \tilde{Q} X_1 Q + \tr Q X_2 \tilde{Q}$$ where the $W_i(X)$ are cubic. For $\tfrac{1}{2} N_1 \lt N_2 \lt \tfrac{2}{3} N_1$, this theory has an infrared-free dual description, as a $U(2N_2-N_1)\times U(N_2)$ gauge theory.

Again, they find supersymmetry-breaking metastable vacua near the origin in field space.

Seiberg duality, and the infrared-free dual description was a useful tool in analysing these models. But I think the general message is that supersymmetric gauge theories are chock-a-block with supersymmetry-breaking local minima and, with a suitable range of parameters, these metastable vacua can be very long-lived.

I like this for two reasons:

1. Because it shows that dynamical supersymmetry breaking is much “easier” than we thought. The models discussed above are easily embedded in string theory (more easily, one might say, than some of the more traditional examples of dynamical SUSY breaking).
2. Because (as sloganeered by Ooguri and Ookouchi) it shows that the existence of a “landscape” of metastable SUSY-breaking vacua is not some artifact of string theory, but is a generic feature of field theory.