Warped supersymmetry breaking

Abstract

We address the size of supersymmetry-breaking effects within string theory settings where the observable sector resides deep within a strongly warped region, with supersymmetry breaking not necessarily localized in that region. Our particular interest is in how the supersymmetry-breaking scale seen by the observable sector depends on this warping. We focus concretely on type IIB flux compactifications and obtain this dependence in two ways: by computing within the microscopic string theory supersymmetry-breaking masses in Dp-brane supermultiplets; and by investigating how warping gets encoded into masses within the low-energy 4D effective theory. We identify two different ways to identify 'the' 4D gravitino in such systems - the state whose supersymmetry is the least broken, and the state whose couplings are the most similar to the 4D graviton's - and argue that these need not select the same state in strongly warped settings. We formulate the conditions required for the existence of a description in terms of a 4D SUGRA formulation, or in terms of 4D SUGRA together with soft-breaking terms, and describe in particular situations where neither exist for some non-supersymmetric compactifications. We suggest that some effects of warping are captured by a linear A dependence in the Kähler potential. We outline some implications of our results for the KKLT scenario of moduli stabilization with broken SUSY.