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. 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 supersymmetry-breaking mass insertions ${\ensuremath{\delta}}_{i3}^{dLR}$ ($i=1$, 2), or in the up-quark sector, i.e. by the mass insertions ${\ensuremath{\delta}}_{i3}^{uLR}$. In the first case we find an enhancement of $b\ensuremath{\rightarrow}s\ensuremath{\gamma}$, which constrains the allowed range of sparticle masses (Fig. 3). In addition, neutral Higgs penguins significantly contribute to ${B}_{s,d}\ensuremath{\rightarrow}{\ensuremath{\mu}}^{+}{\ensuremath{\mu}}^{\ensuremath{-}}$ and, if also ${\ensuremath{\delta}}_{32}^{dLR}$ 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, $|{ϵ}_{K}|$ receives additional positive contributions enforcing large squark and gluino masses (see Fig. 8). In this case also the rare decay $K\ensuremath{\rightarrow}\ensuremath{\pi}\ensuremath{\nu}\overline{\ensuremath{\nu}}$ receives sizable contributions. In conclusion we find that for supersymmetry masses around 1 TeV RFV is an interesting alternative to minimal flavor violation.