Radiative Gaugino Masses

Abstract

We investigate the possibility that gauginos are massless at tree level and that the U(1) R-invariance is broken spontaneously by Higgs vevs, like the chiral symmetry of quarks in the standard model, or else explicitly by dimension 2 or 3 SUSY-breaking terms in the low energy effective Lagrangian. Gluino and lightest neutralino masses then depend on only a few parameters. For a SUSY-breaking scale <~ 400 GeV, the gluino and lightest neutralino have masses typically in the range 1/10 ~ 2 1/2 GeV. On the other hand, for a SUSY-breaking scale several TeV or larger, radiative contributions can yield gluino and lightest neutralino masses of O(50-300) GeV and O(10-30) GeV, respectively. As long as the Higgs vev is the only source of R-invariance breaking, or if SUSY breaking only appears in dimension 2 terms in the effective Lagrangian, the gluino is generically the lightest SUSY particle, modifying the usual phenomenology in interesting ways.