To cite this article: Michael Dine et al JHEP07(2005) Abstract: With respect to the question of supersymmetry breaking, there are three branches of the flux landscape. On one of these, if one requires small cosmological constant, supersymmetry breaking is predominantly at the fundamental scale; on another, the distribution is roughly flat on a logarithmic scale; on the third, the preponderance of vacua are at very low scale. A priori, as we will explain, one can say little about the first branch. The vast majority of these states are not accessible even to crude, approximate analysis. On the other two branches one can hope to do better. But as a result of the lack of access to branch one, and our poor understanding of cosmology, we can at best conjecture about whether string theory predicts low energy supersymmetry or not. If we hypothesize that are on branch two or three, distinctive predictions may be possible. We comment of the status of naturalness within the landscape, deriving, for example, the statistics of the first branch from simple effective field theory reasoning.

In the landscape, states with R symmetries at the classical level form a distinct branch, with a potentially interesting phenomenology. Some preliminary analyses suggested that the population of these states would be significantly suppressed. We survey orientifolds of IIB theories compactified on Calabi-Yau spaces based on vanishing polynomials in weighted projective spaces, and find that the suppression is quite substantial. On the other hand, we find that a Z 2 R-parity is a common feature in the landscape. We discuss whether the cosmological constant and proton decay or cosmology might select the low energy branch. We include also some remarks on split supersymmetry.

The well-accepted Nelson-Seiberg theorem relates R-symmetries to supersymmetry (SUSY) breaking vacua, and provides a guideline for SUSY model building which is the most promising physics beyond the Standard Model. In the case of Wess-Zumino models with perturbative superpotentials, we revise the theorem to a combined necessary and sufficient condition for SUSY breaking which can be easily checked before solving the vacuum. The revised theorem provides a powerful tool to construct either SUSY breaking or SUSY vacua, and offers many practicable applications in low energy SUSY model building and string phenomenology.