1212.6939 (J. L. Chkareuli)

Emergent gauge theories and supersymmetry: a QED primer    [PDF]

J. L. Chkareuli

It is well known that spontaneous Lorentz invariance violation (SLIV) in general vector field theories may lead to an appearance of massless Nambu-Goldstone modes which are identified with photons and other gauge fields in the Standard Model. Nonetheless, it may turn out that SLIV is not the only reason for emergent massless photons to appear if spacetime symmetry is further enlarged. In this connection, a special link may be related to supersymmetry that we try to illustrate in this note by the supersymmetric QED example. We argue that a generic source for massless photons could be spontaneously broken supersymmetry rather than physically manifested SLIV. We consider supersymmetric QED model extended by an arbitrary polynomial potential of massive vector superfield that induces the spontaneous SUSY violation in the visible sector. As a consequence, massless photon emerges as a companion of massless photino which is in fact the Goldstone fermion state in the tree approximation. However, being mixed with another goldstino appearing from a spontaneous SUSY violation in the hidden sector this state largely turns into the light pseudo-goldstino whose physics seems to be of special interest. Remarkably, the photon masslessness appearing at the tree level is further protected against radiative corrections by the simultaneously generated special gauge invariance.

View original: http://arxiv.org/abs/1212.6939