Sfermion Flavor and Proton Decay in High-Scale Supersymmetry

Understand

The discovery of the Higgs boson with a mass of around 125 GeV gives a strong motivation for further study of a high-scale supersymmetry (SUSY) breaking model.

• In this framework, the minimal SUSY SU(5) grand unification model may be viable since heavy sfermions suppress the proton decay via color-triplet Higgs exchanges.
• At the same time, sizable flavor violation in sfermion masses is still allowed by low-energy precision experiments when the mass scale is as high as O(100) TeV, which naturally explains the 125 GeV Higgs mass.
• In the presence of the sfermon flavor violation, however, the rates and branching fractions of proton decay can be drastically changed.