Quasi-degenerate neutrinos and lepton flavor violation in supersymmetric models

In supersymmetric models the misalignment between fermion and sfermion families introduces unsuppressed flavor-changing processes. Even if the mass parameters are chosen to give no flavor violation, family dependent radiative corrections make this adjustment not stable. We analyze the rate of l→l'γ in SUSY-GUT models with three quasi-degenerate neutrinos and universal scalar masses at the Planck scale. We pay special attention to a recently proposed scenario where the low-energy neutrino mixings are generated from identical quark and lepton mixings at large scales. We show the following. (i) To take universal slepton masses at the GUT scale is a very poor approximation, even in no-scale models. (ii) For large neutrino Yukawa couplings the decay μ→eγ would be observed in the planned experiment at PSI. (iii) For large values of tan β the tau coupling gives important corrections, pushing μ→eγ and τ→μγ to accessible rates. In particular, the non-observation of these processes in the near future would exclude the scenario with unification of quark and lepton mixing angles. (iv) The absence of lepton flavor violating decays in upcoming experiments would imply a low value of tan β, small neutrino couplings, and large (≥250 GeV) SUSY-breaking masses. (orig.)