The main topics discussed in this thesis are supersymmetric low-energy effective theories and metastability conditions in generic non-renormalizable models with global and local supersymmetry. In the first part we discuss the conditions under which the low ...
We reconsider the general question of how to characterize most efficiently the low-energy effective theory obtained by integrating out heavy modes in globally and locally supersymmetric theories. We consider theories with chiral and vector multiplets and i ...
We study the scalar mass matrix of general supersymmetric theories with local gauge symmetries, and derive an absolute upper bound on the lightest scalar mass. This bound can be saturated by suitably tuning the superpotential, and its positivity therefore ...
We study the effects induced by heavy fields on the masses of light fields in supersymmetric theories, under the assumption that the heavy mass scale is much higher than the supersymmetry breaking scale. We show that the square-masses of light scalar field ...