Sparticle masses from the superconformal anomaly

We discuss a recently proposed scenario where the sparticle masses are pure ly mediated by gravity through the superconformal anomaly. This scenario el egantly evades the supersymmetric flavor problem since soft masses, like th e anomaly, are not directly sensitive to ultraviolet physics. However, its minimal incarnation fails by predicting tachyonic sleptons. We study the co nditions for decoupling of heavy threshold effects and how these conditions are evaded. We use these results to build a realistic class of models wher e the non-decoupling effects of ultra-heavy vectorlike matter fields elimin ate the tachyons. These models have a flavor invariant superspectrum simila r to that of gauge mediated models. They, however, differ in several aspect s: the gaugino masses are not unified, the colored sparticles are not much heavier than the others, the mu problem is less severe and the gravitino ma ss is well above the weak scale, m(3/2) greater than or similar to 10 TeV. We also show that in models where an R-symmetry can be gauged, the associat ed D-term gives rise to soft terms that are similarly insensitive to the ul traviolet.