Field-theoretic Methods in Strongly-Coupled Models of General Gauge Mediation

An often-exploited feature of the operator product expansion (OPE) is that it incorporates a splitting of ultraviolet and infrared physics. In this paper we use this feature of the OPE to perform simple, approximate computations of soft masses in gauge-mediated supersymmetry breaking. The approximation amounts to truncating the OPEs for hidden-sector current-current operator products. Our method yields visible-sector superpartner spectra in terms of vacuum expectation values of a few hidden-sector IR elementary fields. We manage to obtain reasonable approximations to soft masses, even when the hidden sector is strongly coupled. We demonstrate our techniques in several examples, including a new framework where supersymmetry-breaking arises both from a hidden sector and dynamically.