Gravitational quantum corrections in warped supersymmetric brane worlds

We study gravitational quantum corrections in supersymmetric theories with warped extra dimensions. We develop for this a superfield formalism for linearized gauged supergravity. We show that the 1-loop effective Kahler potential is a simple functional of the KK spectrum in the presence of generic localized kinetic terms at the two branes. We also present a simple understanding of our results by showing that the leading matter effects are equivalent to suitable displacements of the branes. We then apply this general result to compute the gravity-mediated universal soft mass m(0)(2) in models where the visible and the hidden sectors are sequestered at the two branes. We find that the contributions coming from radion mediation and brane-to-brane mediation are both negative in the minimal set-up, but the former can become positive if the gravitational kinetic term localized at the hidden brane has a sizable coefficient. We then compare the features of the two extreme cases of flat and very warped geometry, and give an outlook on the building of viable models. (c) 2005 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.