Runaway potentials and a massive Goldstino

Abstract

We study N=1 globally supersymmetric theories on runaway backgrounds arising from scalar potentials with a slope characterized by a scale M=|V/V′|. We find that, under mild assumptions, there always exists a massive Goldstino in the low-energy effective theory. In the simplest models, the effective mass of such a fermion is of order V/M or of order V/M2μ when a seesaw mechanism takes place, where μ is a scale that characterizes the masses of other heavy fermions.