Moduli stabilization in meta-stable heterotic supergravity vacua

We revisit the issue of moduli stabilization in a class of ${cal N}=1$ four dimensional supergravity theories which are low energy descriptions of standard perturbative heterotic string vacua compactified on Calabi--Yau spaces. In particular, we show how it is possible to stabilize the universal dilaton and K"ahler moduli in a de Sitter/Minkowski vacuum with low energy supersymmetry breaking by means of non--perturbative gauge dynamics, including recent results by Intriligator, Seiberg and Shih. The non--SUSY vacua are meta--stable but sufficiently long--lived