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 th eory with generic soft supersymmetry breaking terms. Trilinear soft breakin g terms play an essential role in determining vacua. For N-f = N-c + 1, chi ral symmetry is broken for a sufficiently large magnitude of trilinear coup lings, 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 great er than or equal to N-c + 1, we have two possible vacua, the trivial and no n-trivial ones. Otherwise, we only have the non-trivial vacuum. which corre sponds 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.