Sfermion flavor and proton decay in high-scale supersymmetry

Abstract

The discovery of the Higgs boson with a mass of around 125 GeV gives a strong motivation for further study of a high-scale supersymmetry (SUSY) breaking model. In this framework, the minimal SUSY SU(5) grand unification model may be viable since heavy sfermions suppress the proton decay via color-triplet Higgs exchanges. At the same time, sizable flavor violation in sfermion masses is still allowed by low-energy precision experiments when the mass scale is as high as O(100) TeV, which naturally explains the 125 GeV Higgs mass. In the presence of the sfermon flavor violation, however, the rates and branching fractions of proton decay can be drastically changed. In this paper, we study the effects of sfermion flavor structure on proton decay and discuss the experimental constraints on sfermion flavor violation. We find that proton-decay experiments may give us a valuable knowledge on sfermon flavor violation, and by combining it with the results from other low-energy precision experiments, we can extract insights to the structure of sfermion sector as well as the underlying grand unification model.