Measuring Flavor Mixing with Minimal Flavor Violation at the LHC

TL;DR

This paper explores the potential to measure flavor mixing between squarks at the LHC within minimal flavor violation models, focusing on scenarios where decay channels are kinematically suppressed.

Contribution

It proposes a method to measure flavor-changing stop decays at the LHC when the lightest stop and neutralino masses are close, a situation previously difficult to analyze.

Findings

Conditions under which flavor-changing decays can be observed at the LHC.

Potential for measuring small flavor mixings in supersymmetric models.

Implications for testing minimal flavor violation assumptions.

Abstract

The mixing between third and second (or first) generation squarks is very small in supersymmetric models with minimal flavor violation such as gauge-, anomaly- or gaugino-mediation. An opportunity to measure this mixing will arise if the lightest stop is close enough in mass to the lightest neutralino, so that the decays into third generation quarks are kinematically forbidden. We analyze under which circumstances it might become possible to measure at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) the rate of the flavor changing stop decays.