On SQCD with massive and massless flavors

We consider supersymmetric QCD in the free magnetic phase with massless and massive flavors. The theory has a supersymmetry breaking pseudo-moduli space of vacua and a runaway behavior far away from the origin. A two-loop computation reveals that the origin is destabilized and there is no meta-stable SUSY breaking solution. We also study the embedding of this model in type IIA string theory and find evidence for similar behavior. The perturbative brane dynamics involves simple interactions between branes, correctly predicting the two-loop result in the gauge theory. Our results also apply to the case when all the flavors are massive but have hierarchy among them, leading to possible instability which is manifest both in field theory and the brane description.