Z′ mass limits and the naturalness of supersymmetry

Abstract

The discovery of a 125 GeV Higgs boson and rising lower bounds on the masses of superpartners have led to concerns that supersymmetric models are now fine-tuned. Large stop masses, required for a 125 GeV Higgs, feed into the electroweak symmetry breaking conditions through renormalization group equations forcing one to fine-tune these parameters to obtain the correct electroweak vacuum expectation value. Nonetheless, this fine-tuning depends crucially on our assumptions about the supersymmetry breaking scale. At the same time, U(1) extensions provide the most compelling solution to the μ problem, which is also a naturalness issue, and allow the tree-level Higgs mass to be raised substantially above Mz. These very well-motivated supersymmetric models predict a new Z’ boson which could be discovered at the LHC, and the naturalness of the model requires that the Z0 boson mass should not be too far above the TeV scale. Moreover, this fine-tuning appears at the tree level, making it less dependent on assumptions about the supersymmetry breaking mechanism. Here we study this fine-tuning for several U(1) supersymmetric extensions of the Standard Model and compare it to the situation in the MSSM where the most direct treelevel fine-tuning can be probed through chargino mass limits. We show that future LHC Z’ searches are extremely important for challenging the most natural scenarios in these models.