Hierarchical soft terms and flavor physics

We study the framework of hierarchical soft terms, in which the first two generations of squarks and sleptons are heavier than the rest of the supersymmetric spectrum. This scheme gives distinctive predictions for the pattern of flavor violations, which we compare to the case of nearly degenerate squarks. Experiments in flavor physics have started to probe the most interesting parameter region, especially in b <-> s transitions, where hierarchical soft terms can predict a phase of B-s mixing much larger than in the Standard Model. (C) 2009 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.