Phenomenology of Soft Terms in the Presence of Nonvanishing Hidden Sector Potential Energy

Abstract

We argue that the hidden sector potential energy is generically of order the intermediate scale although the true cosmological constant does vanish. This would significantly change the predicted values of soft parameters for a variety of supergravity models including those derived from string theory. We stress that this point is particularly relevant for supergravity models in which the soft masses of observable fields vanish at tree level. Implications of a nonzero hidden sector potential energy for low energy phenomenology are also studied.