Charge and Color Breaking Constraints in the Minimal Supersymmetric Standard Model

Understand

The scalar potential of the Minimal Supersymmetric Standard Model (MSSM) admits the existence of vacua with non-vanishing expectation values of electrically and color charged fields.

• If such minima are deep enough, the physical electroweak vacuum is rendered unstable by quantum tunneling.
• By comparing the lifetime of the electroweak vacuum with the age of the universe, the MSSM parameter space can be constrained.
• Furthermore, the appearance of charge and color breaking minima associated with the stop sector is strongly correlated with the Higgs mass, which has been recently measured at the Large Hadron Collider.