Flavour violation in gauge-mediated supersymmetry breaking models: Experimental constraints and phenomenology at the LHC

We present an extensive analysis of gauge-mediated supersymmetry breaking models with minimal and non-minimal flavour violation. We first demonstrate that low-energy, precision electroweak, and cosmological constraints exclude large “collider-friendly” regions of the minimal parameter space. We then discuss various possibilities how flavour violation, although naturally suppressed, may still occur in gauge-mediation models. The introduction of non-minimal flavour violation at the electroweak scale is shown to relax the stringent experimental constraints, so that benchmark points, that are also cosmologically viable, can be defined and their phenomenology, i.e. squark and gaugino production cross sections with flavour violation, at the LHC can be studied.