Supersymmetry Breaking and Composite Extra Dimensions

Abstract

We study supergravity models in four dimensions where the hidden sector is superconformal and strongly-coupled over several decades of energy below the Planck scale, before undergoing spontaneous breakdown of scale invariance and supersymmetry. We show that large anomalous dimensions can suppress Kahler contact terms between the hidden and visible sectors, leading to models in which the hidden sector is "sequestered" and anomaly-mediated supersymmetry breaking can naturally dominate, thus solving the supersymmetric flavor problem. We construct simple, explicit models of the hidden sector based on supersymmetric QCD in the conformal window. The present approach can be usefully interpreted as having an extra dimension responsible for sequestering replaced by the many states of a (spontaneously-broken) strongly-coupled superconformal hidden sector, as dictated by the AdS/CFT correspondence.