Duality in the presence of supersymmetry breaking Original Research Article

We study Seiberg duality for N = 1 supersymmetric QCD with soft supersymmetry-breaking terms. We generate the soft terms through gauge mediation by coupling two theories related by Seiberg duality to the same supersymmetry-breaking sector. In this way, we know what a supersymmetry-breaking perturbation in one theory maps into in its “dual”. Assuming a canonical Kähler potential we calculate the soft terms induced in the magnetic theory and find that some of the scalars acquire negative masses squared. If duality is still good for small supersymmetry breaking, this may imply some specific symmetry-breaking patterns for supersymmetric QCD with small soft supersymmetry-breaking masses, in the case that its dual theory is weakly coupled in the infrared. In the limit of large supersymmetry breaking, the electric theory becomes ordinary QCD. However, the resulting symmetry breaking in the magnetic theory is incompatible with that expected for QCD.