THE EUROPEAN PHYSICAL JOURNAL. C, PARTICLES AND FIELDS
Abstract
We investigate the impact of charge-breaking minima on the vacuum stability of the NMSSM. We concentrate on the case of vanishing A-terms in the sfermion sector, i.e. the only potentially dangerous sources of charge breaking are vacuum expectation values of the charged Higgs fields. We find that, in contrast to Two-Higgs-Doublet Models like the MSSM, at both tree and loop level there exist global charge-breaking minima. Consequently, many regions of parameter space are rendered metastable, which otherwise would have been considered stable if these charge-breaking minima were neglected. However, the inclusion of these new scalar field directions has little impact on otherwise metastable vacuum configurations.
