Impact of CP phases on the search for top and bottom squarks

TL;DR

This paper investigates how complex CP-violating phases in MSSM parameters influence the decay patterns of top and bottom squarks, significantly affecting collider search strategies and parameter extraction.

Contribution

It demonstrates the strong impact of CP phases on squark decay branching ratios within the MSSM, highlighting their importance for collider phenomenology.

Findings

CP phases significantly alter squark decay branching ratios

Impact on collider search strategies for squarks

Implications for MSSM parameter determination

Abstract

We study the decays of top squarks (~t_{1,2}) and bottom squarks (~b_{1,2}) in the Minimal Supersymmetric Standard Model (MSSM) with complex parameters A_t, A_b, mu and M_1. We show that including the corresponding phases strongly affects the branching ratios of ~t_{1,2} and ~b_{1,2} decays in a large domain of the MSSM parameter space. This could have an important impact on the search for ~t_{1,2} and ~b_{1,2} and the determination of the underlying MSSM parameters at future colliders.