Direct Mediation, Duality and Unification

Understand

It is well-known that in scenarios with direct gauge mediation of supersymmetry breaking the messenger fields significantly affect the running of Standard Model couplings and introduce Landau poles which are difficult to avoid.

• This appears to remove any possibility of a meaningful unification prediction and is often viewed as a strong argument against direct mediation.
• We propose two ways that Seiberg duality can circumvent this problem.
• In the first, which we call "deflected-unification", the SUSY-breaking hidden sector is a magnetic theory which undergoes a duality to an electric phase, with fewer elementary degrees of freedom coupled to the MSSM.