A new view on vacuum stability in the MSSM

Understand

A consistent theoretical description of physics at high energies requires an assessment of vacuum stability in either the Standard Model or any extension of it.

• Especially supersymmetric extensions allow for several vacua and the choice of the desired electroweak one gives strong constraints on the parameter space.
• As the general parameter space in the Minimal Supersymmetric Standard Model is huge, any severe constraint on it unrelated to direct phenomenological observations enhances the predictability of the model.
• We perform an updated analysis of possible charge and color breaking minima without relying on fixed directions in field space that minimize certain terms in the potential (known as "D-flat" directions).