Soft supersymmetry breaking in Calabi-Yau orientifolds with D-branes and fluxes

In this paper we compute the N = 1 effective low energy action for a stack of N space-time filling D3-branes in generic type IIB Calabi-Yau orientifolds with non-trivial background fluxes by reducing the Dirac-Born-Infeld and Chern-Simons actions. Specifically, we determine the Kahler potential for the excitations of the D-brane including their couplings to all bulk moduli fields. In the effective theory, N = 1 supergravity is spontaneously broken by the presence of fluxes and we compute the induced soft supersymmetry breaking terms. We find an interesting structure in the resulting soft terms with generically universal soft scalar masses. (C) 2004 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.