The suppression of flavor and $CP$ violation in supersymmetric theories may be due to the mechanism responsible for the structure of the Yukawa couplings. We study model independently the compatibility between low-energy flavor and $CP$ constraints and observability of superparticles at the LHC, assuming a generic correlation between the Yukawa couplings and the supersymmetry breaking parameters. We find that the superpotential operators that generate scalar trilinear interactions are generically problematic. We discuss several ways in which this tension is naturally avoided. In particular, we focus on several frameworks in which the dangerous operators are naturally absent. These frameworks can be combined with many theories of flavor, including those with (flat or warped) extra dimensions, strong dynamics, or flavor symmetries. We show that the resulting theories can avoid all the low-energy constraints while keeping the superparticles light. The intergenerational mass splittings among the sfermions can reflect the structure of the underlying flavor theory, and can be large enough to be measurable at the LHC. Detailed observations of the superparticle spectrum may thus provide new handles on the origin of the flavor structure of the standard model.

• Received 18 August 2008

DOI:https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevD.78.095011