Metastability bounds on flavour-violating trilinear soft terms in the MSSM

Understand

The vacuum stability bounds on flavour-violating trilinear soft terms are revisited from the viewpoint that one should not ban a standard-model-like false vacuum as long as it is long-lived on a cosmological timescale.

• The vacuum transition rate is evaluated numerically by searching for the bounce configuration.
• Like stability, a metastability bound does not decouple even if sfermion masses grow.
• Apart from being more generous than stability, the new bounds are largely independent of Yukawa couplings except for the stop trilinears.