Phenomenology of flavor-mediated supersymmetry breaking

The phenomenology of a new economical supersymmetric model that utilizes dynamical supersymmetry breaking and gauge mediation for the generation of the sparticle spectrum and the hierarchy of fermion masses is discussed. Similarities between the communication of supersymmetry breaking through a messenger sector and the generation of flavor using the Froggatt-Nielsen (FN) mechanism are exploited, leading to the identification of vector-like messenger fields with FN fields and the messenger U(1) as a flavor symmetry. An immediate consequence is that the first and second generation scalars acquire flavor-dependent masses, but do not violate flavor changing neutral current bounds since their mass scale, consistent with ''effective supersymmetry," is of order 10 TeV. We define and advocate a ''minimal flavor-mediated model" (MFMM), recently introduced in the literature, which successfully accommodates the small flavor-breaking parameters of the standard model using order 1 couplings and ratios of flavon field VEVs. The mediation of supersymmetry breaking occurs via two-loop logarithm-enhanced gauge-mediated contributions, as well as several one-loop and two-loop Yukawa-mediated contributions for which we provide analytical expressions. The MFMM is parametrized by a small set of masses and couplings, with values restricted by several model constraints and experimental data. Full two-loop renormalization group evolution is performed, correctly taking into account the negative two-loop gauge contributions from heavy first and second generations. Electroweak symmetry is radiatively broken with the value of mu determined by matching to the Z mass. The weak scale spectrum is generally rather heavy, except for the lightest Higgs boson, the lightest stau, the lightest chargino, the lightest two neutralinos, and of course a very light gravitino. The next-to-lightest sparticle always has a decay length that is larger than the scale of a detector, and is either the lightest stau or the lightest neutralino. Similar to ordinary gauge-mediated models, the best collider search strategies are, respectively, inclusive production of at least one highly ionizing track or events with many taus plus missing energy. In addition, D-0 <->D-0 mixing is also a generic low energy signal. Finally, the dynamical generation of the neutrino masses is briefly discussed.