Thoroughly AMSB QCD

 

Recently it has been demonstrated that anomaly-mediated supersymmetry breaking (AMSB) is a valuable tool for understanding the low-energy phases of non-SUSY gauge theories. For example, applying AMSB to SUSY SU(N) gauge theories with quarks in the fundamental leads to scalar potentials with chiral symmetry breaking minima. Furthermore, the application of AMSB to a class of SUSY SO(N) gauge theories gave the first analytic demonstration of confinement, via the dual Meissner effect, and continuous chiral symmetry breaking in a non-SUSY gauge theory. In this talk I will review these developments and then begin an exploration of the rich moduli space structure of AMSB-deformed SU(N) gauge theories. In particular, we find that these theories often possess "hidden" runaways, closely related to the usual baryonic runaways. Being stabilized around Lambda_QCD, these should not be interpreted as problems with the theory. Rather, they simply signal that the non-SUSY chiral symmetry breaking global minimum is only a local minimum in the SUSY limit. Understanding these runaways is crucial if we want to use AMSB to generate phenomenological models of QCD.