Lorentz Violation and Superpartner Masses

Abstract

We consider Lorentz violation in supersymmetric extensions of the standard model. We perform a spurion analysis to show that, in the simplest natural constructions, the resulting supersymmetry-breaking masses are tiny. In the process, we argue that one of the strongest bounds on Lorentz violation in the photon Lagrangian, which comes from the absence of birefringence from distant astrophysical sources, does not apply when Lorentz violation is parametrized by a single vector.

13 pages. v3: some comments and a short appendix added to elaborate on the relation between LV and SUSY breaking