Abstract
Heeding the theoretical evidence in favor of Supersymmetry(SUSY) as a candidate for physics beyond the Standard Model (SM), two important questions become immediately apparent. First, how can we search for SUSY? Second, what can we learn from these searches? It is these questions that guided the choice of investigation for this theis. Here I present two practical phenomenological studies of SUSY parameter space, which are now in ongoing experimental development. The two processes I focus on are the anomalous magnetic moment of the muon, and the rare meson decay $B_s
ightarrow mu^+ mu^-$. For both of these processes to be experimentally interesting, the ratio of the vacuum expectation values of the two Higgs fields, $ aneta = langle H_U
angle / langle H_D
angle$, must take on large values. Thus I spend some time motivating large values of $ aneta$ to facilitate interest in this region of parameter space. I shall show that the muon anomalous magnetic moment gives access to information about the slepton and gaugino sectors of the Minimal Supersymmetric Standard Model (MSSM), and the rare decay $B_s
ightarrow mu^+ mu^-$ allows the extraction of information about the squarks, the Higgs sector, $ aneta$, and possibly the origins of SUSY breaking. Both of these have the possibilty to provide circumstantial evidence for SUSY, or become useful constraints on SUSY models.
|
