Dirac gauginos, gauge mediation and unification

We investigate the building of models with Dirac gauginos and perturbative gauge coupling unification. Here, in contrast to the MSSM, additional fields are required for unification, and these can naturally play the role of the messengers of supersymmetry breaking. We present a framework within which such models can be constructed, including the constraints that the messenger sector must satisfy; and the renormalisation group equations for the soft parameters, which differ from those of the MSSM. For illustration, we provide the spectrum at the electroweak scale for explicit models whose gauge couplings unify at the scale predicted by heterotic strings. (C) 2010 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.