Phenomenological consequences of radiative flavor violation in the MSSM

Abstract

In this article we investigate the consequences of radiative flavor violation (RFV) in the Minimal Supersymmetric Standard Model (MSSM). In this framework the small off-diagonal elements of the Cabibbo-Kobayashi-Maskawa (CKM) matrix and the small quark masses of the first two generations are generated from the trilinear supersymmetry-breaking terms. The impact of RFV on flavor-physics observables is studied in detail. We focus on the limiting cases in which the CKM matrix is either generated in the down-sector, i.e. by the soft SUSY-breaking mass insertions delta^dLR_i3 (i=1,2), or in the up-quark sector, i.e. by the mass insertions delta^uLR_i3. In the first case we find an enhancement of b->s gamma, which constrains the allowed range of sparticle masses (Fig. 3). In addition, neutral Higgs penguins significantly contribute to B_s,d->mu^+mu^- and, if also delta^dLR_32 is different from zero, these Higgs effects are capable of explaining the observed CP phase in the B_s system. If, on the other hand, the CKM generation takes place in the up-sector, |epsilon_K| receives additional positive contributions enforcing large squark and gluino masses (see Fig. 8). In this case also the rare decay K->pi nu nu receives sizable contributions. In conclusion we find that for SUSY masses around 1 TeV RFV is an interesting alternative to Minimal Flavor Violation (MFV).

12 pages, 10 figures, version accepted for publication in PRD, eq. (14) and eq. (15) corrected