Lifshitz-sector mediated SUSY breaking

Abstract

We propose a novel mechanism of SUSY breaking by coupling a Lorentz-invariant supersymmetric matter sector to non-supersymmetric gravitational interactions with Lifshitz scaling. The improved UV properties of Lifshitz propagators moderate the otherwise uncontrollable ultraviolet divergences induced by gravitational loops. This ensures that both the amount of induced Lorentz violation and SUSY breaking in the matter sector are controlled by ΛHL2 /MP2 the ratio of the Hořava-Lifshitz cross-over scale ΛHL to the Planck scale M P . This ratio can be kept very small, providing a novel way of explicitly breaking supersymmetry without reintroducing fine-tuning. We illustrate our idea by considering a model of scalar gravity with Hořava-Lifshitz scaling coupled to a supersymmetric Wess-Zumino matter sector, in which we compute the two-loop SUSY breaking corrections to the masses of the light scalars due to the gravitational interactions and the heavy fields. © 2014 SISSA.