Cosmological constant and kinetic supersymmetry breakdown on a moving brane

We consider cosmological solutions in 5d locally supersymmetric theories including boundary actions, with either opposite tension branes for identical brane chiralities or equal tension branes for flipped brane chiralities. We analyse the occurrence of supersymmetry breakdown in both situations. We find that supersymmetry as seen by a brane observer is broken due to the motion of the brane in the bulk. When the brane energy-momentum tensor is dominated by the brane tension, the 4d vacuum energy on the observable brane is positive and proportional to the inverse square of the brane local time. We find that the mass splitting within supersymmetric multiplets living on the brane is of the order of the inverse of the brane local time, examplifying the tight relation between the vacuum energy scale and the supersymmetry breaking scale. (C) 2003 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.