Mass formulae and natural hierarchy in string effective supergravities

We study some conditions for the hierarchy m 3 2 ≪ MP to occur naturally in a generic effective supergravity theory. Absence of fine-tunuinf and perturbative calculabilty require that the effective potential has a sliding gravitino mass and vanishing cosmological constant, up to O(m 3 24) corrections. In particular, cancellation of quadratically divergent contributions to the one-loop effective potential should take place, including the 'hidden sector' of the theory. We show that these conditions can be met in the effective supergravities derived from four-dimensional superstrings, with supersymmetry broken either at the string tree-level via compactification, or by non-perturbative effects such as gaugino condensation. A crucial role is played by some approximate scaling symmetries, which are remnants of discrete target-space dualities in the large moduli limit. We derive explicit formulae for the soft breaking terms arising from this class of 'large hierarchy compatible' (LHC) supergravities. © 1994.