Supergravity as the messenger of supersymmetry breaking

A systematic study is made of theories in which supergravity is spontaneously broken in a "hidden" sector of superfields that interact with ordinary matter only through supergravity. General rules are given for calculating the low-energy effective potential in such theories. This potential is given as the sum of ordinary supersymmetric terms involving a low-energy effective superpotential whose mass terms arise from integrating out the heavy particles associated with grand unification, plus supersymmetry-breaking terms that depend on the details of the hidden sector and the Kähler potential only through the values of four small complex mass parameters. The result is not the same as would be obtained by ignoring grand unification and inserting small mass parameters into the superpotential from the beginning. The general results are applied to a class of models with a pair of Higgs doublets.