https://doi.org/10.1140/epjc/s10052-017-4908-4
Letter
Spontaneous charge breaking in the NMSSM: dangerous or not?
1
Bethe Center for Theoretical Physics and Physikalisches Institut der Universität Bonn, Nußallee 12, 53115, Bonn, Germany
2
Institute for Theoretical Physics (ITP), Karlsruhe Institute of Technology, Engesserstraße 7, 76128, Karlsruhe, Germany
3
Institute for Nuclear Physics (IKP), Karlsruhe Institute of Technology, Hermann-von-Helmholtz-Platz 1, 76344, Eggenstein-Leopoldshafen, Germany
* e-mail: mkrauss@th.physik.uni-bonn.de
Received:
20
March
2017
Accepted:
9
May
2017
Published online:
19
May
2017
We investigate the impact of charge-breaking minima on the vacuum stability of the NMSSM. We concentrate on the case of vanishing A-terms in the sfermion sector, i.e. the only potentially dangerous sources of charge breaking are vacuum expectation values of the charged Higgs fields. We find that, in contrast to Two-Higgs-Doublet Models like the MSSM, at both tree and loop level there exist global charge-breaking minima. Consequently, many regions of parameter space are rendered metastable, which otherwise would have been considered stable if these charge-breaking minima were neglected. However, the inclusion of these new scalar field directions has little impact on otherwise metastable vacuum configurations.
© The Author(s), 2017
