Minimal flavor violation in supersymmetric theories

The aim of the MFV hypothesis is to reconcile two contradictory facts. On one hand, tremendous advances from flavor factories have confirmed the Standard Model (SM) flavor structures to an impressive precision, in both the quark sector through K and B physics observables, and in the lepton sector where tight bounds on flavor transitions have been obtained. On the other hand, most New Physics (NP) models extend the SM flavor sector. With new degrees of freedom at or below the TeV scale, so as to avoid hierarchy problems, NP signals should have been seen in flavor physics. Thus, the NP flavor structures cannot be generic but are necessarily finetuned to pass all experimental constraints. Our purpose here is to describe how MFV manages to naturally achieve these adjustments in the flavor sectors of the MSSM, the minimal supersymmetric extension to the SM. Before that, in the next section, we analyze in some details the flavor structures of both the SM and MSSM using the language of the flavor symmetry and its spurions. This language is central to the formulation of the two conditions for MFV, described in Sec. 3. Finally, the phenomenological implications are briefly reviewed in Sec. 4.