Restricted flavor structure of soft SUSY breaking trilinear couplings

We analyze the flavor structure of the trilinear couplings in the different theoretical models of SUSY breaking. We generically obtain A(ij) = A(i)(L) + A(j)(R) in all the models examined. In fact, this is the rigorous form w hen SUSY breaking effects appear through the Kahler metric of chiral fields or through wave-function renormalization. Indeed, the low-energy phenomeno logical requirements from the absence of charge and color breaking minima a nd the measurements in flavor changing neutral current (FCNC) observables s trongly favor this restricted form of the trilinear matrices. As a straight forward consequence the number of unknown parameters associated with the tr ilinear couplings is decreased in a factor of 2. (C) 2001 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.