The Fayet-Iliopoulos D-term and its renormalisation in the MSSM

Abstract

We consider the renormalisation of the Fayet-Iliopoulos D-term in a softly-broken supersymmetric gauge theory with a non-simple gauge group containing an abelian factor, and present the associated beta-function through three loops. We also include in an appendix the result for several abelian factors. We specialise to the case of the minimal supersymmetric standard model (MSSM), and investigate the behaviour of the Fayet-Iliopoulos coupling for various boundary conditions at the unification scale. We focus particularly on the case of non-standard soft supersymmetry breaking couplings, for which the Fayet-Iliopoulos coupling evolves significantly between the unification scale and the weak scale.