The Dine-Seiberg-Thomas model (DSTM) is the simplest version of the new physics beyond the minimal supersymmetric standard model (MSSM), in the sense that its Higgs sector has just two dimension-five operators, which are obtained from the power series of the energy scale for the new physics in the effective action analysis. We study the possibility of spontaneous $CP$ violation in the Higgs sector of the DSTM, which consists of two Higgs doublets. We find that the $CP$ violation may be triggered spontaneously by a complex phase, obtained as the relative phase between the vacuum expectation values of the two Higgs doublets. At the tree level, for a reasonably established parameter region, the masses of the three neutral Higgs bosons and their corresponding coupling coefficients to a pair of $Z$ bosons in the DSTM are calculated such that the results are inconsistent with the experimental constraint by the LEP data. Thus, the LEP2 data exclude the possibility of spontaneous $CP$ violation in the DSTM at the tree level. On the other hand, we find that, for a wide area in the parameter region, the $CP$ symmetry may be broken spontaneously in the Higgs sector of the DSTM at the one-loop level, where top quark and scalar top quark loops are taken into account. The upper bound on the radiatively corrected mass of the lightest neutral Higgs boson of the DSTM is about 87 GeV, in the spontaneous $CP$ violation scenario. We confirm that the LEP data does not exclude this numerical result.

• Received 19 July 2009

DOI:https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevD.80.055009