Soft SUSY breaking and family symmetry

Abstract

A spontaneously broken non-Abelian SU(3) family symmetry can generate a realistic form for quark, charged lepton and neutrino masses and mixing angles. It also gives a new solution to the SUSY flavour problem by ensuring near family degeneracy of the soft mass SUSY breaking terms. However the need to generate large third generation fermion masses means that the group must be strongly broken to SU(2) giving significant corrections to the third family squark and slepton masses. We investigate the phenomenological implications of such breaking and show that it leads to new solutions capable of fitting all present experimental measurements and bounds as well as the dark matter abundance.