Supersymmetry Breaking with Zero Vacuum Energy in M-Theory Flux Compactifications

An attractive mechanism to break supersymmetry in vacua with zero vacuum energy arose in E_8 x E_8 heterotic models with hidden sector gaugino condensate. An H-flux balances the exponentially small condensate on shell and fixes the complex structure moduli. At quantum level this balancing is, however, obstructed by the quantization of the H-flux. We show that the warped flux compactification background in heterotic M-theory can solve this problem through a warp-factor suppression of the integer flux relative to the condensate. We discuss the suppression mechanism both in the M-theory and the 4-dimensional effective theory and provide a derivation of the condensate's superpotential which is free of delta-function squared ambiguities.