Vacuum Stability with Tachyonic Boundary Higgs Masses in No-Scale Supersymmetry or Gaugino Mediation

Understand

No-scale supersymmetry or gaugino mediation augmented with large negative Higgs soft masses at the input scale provides a simple solution to the supersymmetric flavor problem while giving rise to a neutralino LSP.

• However, to obtain a neutralino LSP it is often necessary to have tachyonic input Higgs soft masses that can give rise to charge-and-color-breaking (CCB) minima and unbounded-from-below (UFB) directions in the low energy theory.
• We investigate the vacuum structure in these theories to determine when such problematic features are present.
• When the standard electroweak vacuum is only metastable, we compute its lifetime under vacuum tunneling.