SUPERSYMMETRIC FRAMEWORK FOR A DYNAMICAL FERMION MASS HIERARCHY

We propose a new framwork for constructing supersymmetric theories of flavor, in which flavor symmetry breaking is triggered by the dynamica l breakdown of supersymmetry at low energies. All mass scales in our s cheme are generated from the supersymmetry-breaking scale Lambda(SSB) approximate to 10(7) GeV through radiative corrections. We assume a sp ontaneously broken flavor symmetry and the Froggatt-Nielsen mechanism for generating the fermion Yukawa couplings. Supersymmetry breaking ra diatively induces a vacuum expectation value for a scalar field, which generates invariant masses for the Froggatt-Nielsen fields at M(F) ap proximate to 10(4) GeV. ''Flavon'' fields phi, which spontaneously bre ak the flavor symmetry, naturally acquire negative squared masses due to two-loop diagrams involving the Froggatt-Nielsen fields, and acquir e vacuum expectation values of order [phi] approximate to M(F)/16 pi(2 ). The fermion mass hierarchy arises in our framework as a power serie s in the ratio [phi]/M(F) approximate to 1/16 pi(2).