Supersymmetric custodial Higgs triplets and the breaking of universality

© 2015 American Physical Society. Higgs triplet models are known to have difficulties obtaining agreement with electroweak precision data and in particular constraints on the ρ parameter. Either a global SU(2)L - SU(2)R symmetry has to be imposed on the scalar potential at the electroweak scale, as done in the well-known Georgi-Machacek (GM) model, or the triplet vacuum expectation values must be very small. We construct a supersymmetric model that can satisfy constraints on the ρ parameter, even if these two conditions are not fulfilled. We supersymmetrize the GM model by imposing the SU(2)L - SU(2)R symmetry at a scale M, which we argue should be at or above the messenger scale, where supersymmetry breaking is transmitted to the observable sector. We show that scales M well above 100 TeV and sizable contributions from the triplets to electroweak symmetry breaking can be comfortably accommodated. We discuss the main phenomenological properties of the model and demonstrate that the departure from custodial symmetry at the electroweak scale, due to radiative breaking, can show up at the LHC as a deviation in the "universal" relation for the Higgs couplings to WW and ZZ. As a by-product of supersymmetry, we also show that one can easily obtain both large tree-level and one-loop corrections to the Higgs mass. This allows for top squarks that can be significantly lighter and with smaller mixing than those needed in the MSSM.