Spontaneous charge breaking in the NMSSM: dangerous or not?

• Main Authors: Manuel E. Krauss, Toby Opferkuch, Florian Staub
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: SpringerOpen 2017-05-01
• Series: European Physical Journal C: Particles and Fields
• Subjects: Higgs Boson; Minimal Supersymmetric Standard Model; Higgs Mass; Vacuum Stability; Charge Conserve
• Online Access: http://link.springer.com/article/10.1140/epjc/s10052-017-4908-4
• ISSN: 1434-6044; 1434-6052

Abstract We investigate the impact of charge-breaking minima on the vacuum stability of the NMSSM. We concentrate on the case of vanishing A-terms in the sfermion sector, i.e. the only potentially dangerous sources of charge breaking are vacuum expectation values of the charged Higgs fields. We find that, in contrast to Two-Higgs-Doublet Models like the MSSM, at both tree and loop level there exist global charge-breaking minima. Consequently, many regions of parameter space are rendered metastable, which otherwise would have been considered stable if these charge-breaking minima were neglected. However, the inclusion of these new scalar field directions has little impact on otherwise metastable vacuum configurations.