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 $\sqrt{V} / M$, or of order $V / M^2 \mu$ when a seesaw mechanism takes place, where $\mu$ is a scale that characterizes the masses of other heavy fermions.