Impact of CP phases on stop and sbottom searches

Abstract

We study the decays of top squarks (stop_{1,2}) and bottom squarks (sbottom_{1,2}) in the Minimal Supersymmetric Standard Model (MSSM) with complex parameters A_t, A_b, mu and M_1. We show that including the corresponding phases substantially affects the branching ratios of stop_{1,2} and sbottom_{1,2} decays in a large domain of the MSSM parameter space. We find that the branching ratios can easily change by a factor of 2 and more when varying the phases. This could have an important impact on the search for stop_{1,2} and sbottom_{1,2} and the determination of the MSSM parameters at future colliders.

17 pages, 5 figures, LaTeX2e