Anomalous U(1), gaugino condensation and supergravity

The interplay between gaugino condensation and an anomalous Fayet-Iliopoulos term in string theories is not trivial and has important consequences concerning the size and type of the soft SUSY breaking terms. In this paper we examine this issue, generalizing previous work to the supergravity context. This allows, in particular,to properly implement the cancellation of the cosmological constant, which is crucial for a correct treatment of the soft breaking terms. We obtain that the D-term contribution to the soft masses is expected to be larger than the F-term one. Moreover gaugino masses must be much smaller than scalar masses. We illustrate these results with explicit examples. All this has relevant phenomenological consequences, amending previous results in the literature. (C) 1998 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.