Building a Nest at Tree Level: Classical Metastability and Non-Trivial Vacuum Structure in Supersymmetric Field Theories

Understand

It is becoming increasingly clear that metastable vacua may play a prominent role in supersymmetry-breaking.

• To date, however, this idea has been realized only in models where non-perturbative dynamics complicates the analysis of metastability.
• In this paper, we present a simple construction in which metastable vacua occur classically, i.e., at tree-level, and in which supersymmetry-breaking is sourced by both D-terms and F-terms.
• All relevant dynamics is perturbative, and hence calculations of vacuum energies and lifetimes can be performed explicitly.