Higgs Messengers

TL;DR

This paper investigates how Higgs fields can serve as messengers of supersymmetry breaking, introducing new interactions that lead to flavor-dependent sfermion mass shifts and viable models consistent with electroweak constraints.

Contribution

It introduces novel Higgs-messenger interactions in gauge mediation, analyzing their phenomenological implications and providing explicit models compatible with experimental constraints.

Findings

Higgs fields can act as supersymmetry breaking messengers.

New interactions cause flavor-dependent sfermion mass shifts.

Models can satisfy electroweak precision constraints with altered spectra.

Abstract

We explore the consequences of the Higgs fields acting as messengers of supersymmetry breaking. The hidden-sector paradigm in the gauge mediation framework is relaxed by allowing two types of gauge-invariant, renormalizable operators that are typically discarded: direct coupling between the Higgses and supersymmetry breaking singlets, and Higgs-messenger mixing terms. The most important phenomenological consequence is a flavor-dependent shift in sfermion masses. This is from a one-loop contribution, which we compute for a general set of weak doublet messengers. We also study a couple of explicit models in detail, finding that precision electroweak constraints can be satisfied with a spectrum significantly different from that of gauge mediation.