Stability of the CMSSM against sfermion VEVs

Understand

The recent discovery of a Higgs boson by the LHC experiments has profound implications for supersymmetric models.

• In particular, in the context of restricted models, such as the supergravity-inspired constrained minimal supersymmetric standard model, one finds that preferred regions in parameter space have large soft supersymmetry-breaking trilinear couplings.
• This potentially gives rise to charge- and/or color-breaking minima besides those with the correct breaking of $SU(2)_L \times U(1)_Y$.
• We investigate the stability of parameter points in this model against tunneling to possible deeper color- and/or charge-breaking minima of the one-loop effective potential.