Guide to anomaly-mediated supersymmetry-breaking QCD

We present a careful study of the chiral symmetry breaking minima and the baryonic directions in supersymmetric QCD (SU(Nc) with Nf flavors) perturbed by anomaly mediated supersymmetry breaking (AMSB). For the s-confining case of Nf=Nc+1 and most of the free-magnetic phase (Nf≤1.43Nc) we find that naive tree level baryonic runaways are stabilized by loop effects. Runaways are present, however, for the upper end of the free magnetic phase (Nf≳1.43Nc) and into conformal window, signaling the existence of incalculable minima at large field values of O(Λ). Nevertheless, the chiral symmetry breaking points are locally stable, and are expected to continuously connect to the vacua of QCD for large SUSY breaking. The case of Nf=Nc requires particular care due to the inherently strongly coupled nature of the quantum modified moduli space. Due to the incalculability of critical Kähler potential terms, the stability of the chiral symmetry breaking point along baryonic directions cannot be determined for Nf=Nc. With the exception of this case, all theories to which AMSB can be applied (Nf<3Nc) possess stable chiral symmetry breaking minima, and all theories with Nf≲1.43Nc (aside from Nf=Nc) are protected from runaways to incalculable minima.