Flavor violation in supersymmetric theories with gauged flavor symmetries

In this paper, we study flavor violation in supersymmetric models with gauged flavor symmetries. There are several sources of flavor violation in these theories. The dominant flavor violation is the tree-level D-term contribution to scalar masses generated by flavor symmetry breaking. We present a new approach for suppressing these phenomenologically dangerous effects by separating the flavor-breaking sector from the supersymmetry-breaking sector. This separation can be achieved either in geometrical setups or in a dynamical way. We also point out that radiative corrections from the gauginos of gauged flavor symmetries can yield sizable generation-dependent masses of scalars. Generically the gaugino mass effects are not suppressed, even if the dominant D-term contribution is suppressed. We also analyze the constraints on the flavor symmetry sector resulting from these flavor-violating corrections. (author)