Radiative CP phases in supergravity theories

In this Letter, we point out that possible sources of CP violation originate from radiative corrections to soft terms which are ubiquitous in supergravity theories and also in other high-energy frameworks of supersymmetry breaking. With these radiative phases of gaugino masses and scalar couplings, a complex phase of Higgs holomorphic mass parameter is generated via renormalization-group running down to low energy. It is found that its phase value is mainly controlled by wino as well as gluino, which generally receive different radiative corrections to their complex phases, even if the leading part of mass parameters follow from the universality hypothesis. The radiatively generated phases are constrained by the existing experimental bounds on electric dipole moments, and may be detectable in future measurements. They are also found to be available for the cancellation mechanism to be worked. (C) 2004 Published by Elsevier B.V.