Stability of R parity in supersymmetric models extended by U(1)_{B-L}

TL;DR

This paper investigates the stability of R-parity-conserving vacua in a supersymmetric model extended with U(1)_{B-L}, revealing that many acceptable vacua are actually metastable with deeper R-parity-violating vacua.

Contribution

It provides a comprehensive analysis of vacuum stability in a constrained supersymmetric model with gauged U(1)_{B-L}, using homotopy continuation to identify all extrema and assess R-parity conservation.

Findings

Most parameter points preserve R-parity

A significant portion have deeper R-parity-violating vacua

Previous qualitative conclusions are broadly correct but differ in details

Abstract

We perform a study of the stability of R-parity-conserving vacua of a constrained version of the minimal supersymmetric model with a gauged U(1)_{B-L} which can conserve R-parity, using homotopy continuation to find all the extrema of the tree-level potential, for which we also calculated the one-loop corrections. While we find that a majority of the points in the parameter space preserve R-parity, we find that a significant portion of points which naively have phenomenologically acceptable vacua which conserve R-parity actually have deeper vacua which break R-parity through sneutrino VEVs. We investigate under what conditions the deeper R-parity-violating vacua appear. We find that while previous exploratory work was broadly correct in some of its qualitative conclusions, we disagree in detail.