Distinguishing anomaly mediation from gauge mediation with a W-ino next-to-lightest supersymmetric particle -: art. no. 015008

A striking consequence of supersymmetry breaking communicated purely via the superconformal anomaly is that the gaugino masses are proportional to the gauge beta functions. This result, however, is not unique to anomaly mediation. We present examples of "generalized" gauge-mediated models with messengers in standard model representations that give nearly identical predictions for the gaugino masses, but positive (mass)(2) for all sleptons. There are remarkable similarities between an anomaly-mediated model with a small additional universal mass added to all scalars and the gauge-mediated models with a long-lived W-ino next-to-lightest supersymmetric particle, leading to only a small set of observables that provide robust distinguishing criteria. These include ratios of the heaviest to lightest selectrons, smuons, and top squarks. The sign of the gluino soft mass is an unambiguous distinction, but requires measuring a difficult class of one-loop radiative corrections to sparticle interactions. A high precision measurement of the Higgs-boson-b-(b) over bar coupling is probably the most promising interaction from which this sign might be extracted.