Abstract

It is conjectured that flavor mixing furnishes a universal mechanism for the spontaneous breaking of supersymmetry. The conjecture is proved explicitly for the mixing of two chiral N = 1 supermultiplets and arguments for its general validity are given. That is an instance of the O'Raifeartaigh Lagrangian for which there is no tree-level nor perturbative breaking. Nonetheless, the dynamical breaking occurs due to the vacuum condensate, a mixing-induced nonperturbative effect that lifts the zero point energy. (C) 2011 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.