Spontaneous Charge Breaking in the NMSSM - Dangerous or not?

Abstract

We investigate the impact of charge-breaking minima on the vacuum stability of the NMSSM. We find that, in contrast to Two-Higgs-Doublet Models like the MSSM, at both tree- and loop-level there exists 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.