Higgs boson couplings to quarks with supersymmetric CP and flavor violations

• Published in: Physics letters. B 2003-10, Vol.571 (3-4), p.193-208
• Main Author: Demir, Durmuş A.
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• ISSN: 0370-2693; 1873-2445
• DOI: 10.1016/j.physletb.2003.07.069

In minimal supersymmetric model (SUSY) with a light Higgs sector, explicit CP violation and most general flavor mixings in the sfermion sector, integration of the superpartners out of the spectrum induces potentially large contributions to the Yukawa couplings of light quarks via those of the heavier ones. These corrections can be sizeable even for moderate values of tanβ, and remain nonvanishing even if all superpartners decouple. When the SUSY breaking scale is close to the electroweak scale, the Higgs exchange effects can compete with the gauge boson and box diagram contributions to rare processes, and their partial cancellations can lead to relaxation of the existing bounds on flavor violation sources. In this case there exist sizeable enhancements in flavor-changing Higgs decays. When the superpartners completely decouple, however, the Higgs mediation becomes the dominant SUSY contribution to rare processes the saturation of which, without a strong suppression of the flavor mixings, prefers large tanβ and certain ranges for the CP-odd phases. The decay rate of the lightest Higgs into light down quarks becomes comparable with that into the bottom quark. Moreover, the Higgs decay into the up quark is significantly enhanced. There are observable implications for rare processes, atomic electric dipole moments, and collider searches for Higgs bosons.