Vacuum Structure of Softly Broken N=1 Supersymmetric QCD

Abstract

We study softly broken N=1 supersymmetric QCD with the gauge group $SU(N_c)$ and $N_f$ flavors of quark pairs. We investigate vacuum structure of the theory with generic soft supersymmetry breaking terms. Trilinear soft breaking terms play an essential role in determining vacua. For $N_f=N_c+1$, chiral symmetry is broken for a sufficiently large magnitude of trilinear couplings, while it is unbroken in the case with only soft masses. In the case where appearance of trilinear coupling terms is allowed, i.e. for $N_f \geq N_c+1$, we have two possible vacua, the trivial and non-trivial ones. Otherwise, we only have the non-trivial vacuum, which corresponds to the non-trivial vacuum in the $N_f \geq N_c+1$ theory.