Vacuum Alignment in SUSY A4 Models

Understand

In this note we discuss the vacuum alignment in supersymmetric models with spontaneously broken flavour symmetries in the presence of soft supersymmetry (SUSY) breaking terms.

• We show that the inclusion of soft SUSY breaking terms can give rise to non-vanishing vacuum expectation values (VEVs) for the auxiliary components of the flavon fields.
• These non-zero VEVs can have an important impact on the phenomenology of this class of models, since they can induce an additional flavour violating contribution to the sfermion soft mass matrix of right-left (RL) type.
• We carry out an explicit computation in a class of SUSY A4 models predicting tri-bimaximal mixing in the lepton sector.