Observing The Hidden Sector

TL;DR

This paper investigates how hidden-sector dynamics influence observable supersymmetry-breaking parameters in the MSSM, revealing potential unification effects and proposing methods to extract hidden-sector parameters from experiments.

Contribution

It demonstrates that hidden-sector renormalization can mimic unification effects and shows how hidden-sector parameters might be experimentally determined.

Findings

Hidden-sector effects can cause apparent scalar mass unification.

Parameters of the hidden sector may be extracted from experimental data.

Simple models illustrate the potential observability of hidden-sector dynamics.

Abstract

We study the effects of renormalization due to hidden-sector dynamics on observable soft supersymmetry-breaking parameters in the minimal supersymmetric extension of the Standard Model (MSSM), under various hypotheses about their universality at a high input scale. We show that hidden-sector renormalization effects may induce the spurious appearance of unification of the scalar masses at some lower scale, as in mirage unification scenarios. We demonstrate in simple two-parameter models of the hidden-sector dynamics that the parameters may in principle be extracted from experimental measurements, rendering the hidden sector observable. We also discuss the ingredients that would be necessary to carry this programme out in practice.