Soft Supersymmetry Breaking from Coset Space Dimensional Reduction

The Coset Space Dimensional Reduction scheme is briefly reviewed. Then a ten-dimensional supersymmetric $E_8$ gauge theory is reduced over symmetric and non-symmetric six-dimensional coset spaces. In general a four-dimensional non-supersymmetric gauge theory is obtained in case the used coset space is symmetric, while a softly broken supersymmetric gauge theory is obtained if the used coset space is non-symmetric. In the process of exhibiting the above properties we also present two attractive models, worth exploiting further, which lead to interesting GUTs with three families in four dimensions.