BOSONIC THERMAL MASSES IN SUPERSYMMETRY

Effective thermal masses of bosonic particles in a plasma play an impo rtant role in many different phenomena. We compute them in general sup ersymmetric models at leading order. The origin of the different corre ctions is explicitly shown for the formulas to be applicable when some particles decouple. The correct treatment of Boltzmann decoupling in the presence of trilinear couplings and mass mixing is also discussed. As a relevant example, we present results for the minimal supersymmet ric standard model.