Vacuum structure of softly broken N = 1 supersymmetric QCD

We study softly broken N = 1 supersymmetric QCD with the gauge group SU(N-c) and N-f flavors of quark pairs. We investigate vacuum structure of the theory with generic soft supersymmetry breaking terms. Trilinear soft breaking terms play an essential role in determining vacua. For N-f = N-c + 1, chiral symmetry is broken for a sufficiently large magnitude of trilinear couplings, while it is unbroken in the case with only soft masses. In the case where appearance of trilinear coupling terms is allowed, i.e. for N-f greater than or equal to N-c + 1, we have two possible vacua, the trivial and non-trivial ones. Otherwise, we only have the non-trivial vacuum. which corresponds to the non-trivial vacuum in the N-f greater than or equal to N-c + 1 theory. (C) 1998 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.