SHOULD SQUARKS BE DEGENERATE

For generic squark masses, box diagrams with squarks and gluinos give unacceptably large contributions to neutral meson (K, B and D) mixing. The standard solution to this problem is to assume that squarks are d egenerate to a very good approximation. We suggest an alternative mech anism to suppress squark contributions to flavor changing neutral curr ents: the alignment of quark with squark mass matrices. This mechanism arises naturally in the framework of abelian horizontal symmetries.