Impact of CP phases on stop and sbottom searches

Abstract

We study the decays of top squarks ($\text{t}\text{̃}{}_{\mathrm{1,2}}$) and bottom squarks ($\text{b}\text{̃}{}_{\mathrm{1,2}}$) in the Minimal Supersymmetric Standard Model (MSSM) with complex parameters A_t,A_b,μ and M₁. We show that including the corresponding phases substantially affects the branching ratios of $\text{t}\text{̃}{}_{\mathrm{1,2}}$ and $\text{b}\text{̃}{}_{\mathrm{1,2}}$ decays in a large domain of the MSSM parameter space. We find that the branching ratios can easily change by a factor of 2 and more when varying the phases. This could have an important impact on the search for $\text{t}\text{̃}{}_{\mathrm{1,2}}$ and $\text{b}\text{̃}{}_{\mathrm{1,2}}$ and the determination of the MSSM parameters at future colliders.