BOTTOM-UP APPROACH TO UNIFIED SUPERGRAVITY MODELS

A new approach is proposed to the phenomenological study of a generic unified supergravity model, which reduces to the minimal supersymmetric standard model. The model is effectively parametrized in terms of five low energy observables. In consequence, it is easy to investigate systematically the parameter space of the model, allowed by the requirement of radiative electroweak symmetry breaking and by the present experimental limits. Radiative corrections due to large Yukawa couplings and particle-sparticle mass splitting are included into the analysis and found to have important effects, in particular on the degree of fine tuning in the model. In this framework there are presented the predictions of the model for various low energy physical observables, and their dependence on the values of the top quark mass and tan beta is discussed. Results are also given for the large tan beta scenario, tan beta almost-equal-to m(t) /m(b). Our approach can be easily extended to non-minimal supergravity models, which do not assume the universality of the soft breaking parameters at the unification scale M(X). Such an extension will be particularly useful once the masses of some sparticles are known, allowing for a model independent study of the parameter space at M(X).