The existence of multiple non-equivalent minima of the scalar potential in SUSY models both raises technical challenges and introduces interesting physics. The technical challenges are now that one has to find several minima and evaluate which is the
deepest, as well as calculate the tunneling time from a false vacuum to the true vacuum. We present here studies on the vacuum stability and color/charge breaking minima in the CMSSM and R parity violating minima in a B-L extended MSSM.
We perform a study of the stability of R-parity-conserving vacua of a constrained version of the minimal supersymmetric model with a gauged U(1)_{B-L} which can conserve R-parity, using homotopy continuation to find all the extrema of the tree-level
potential, for which we also calculated the one-loop corrections. While we find that a majority of the points in the parameter space preserve R-parity, we find that a significant portion of points which naively have phenomenologically acceptable vacua which conserve R-parity actually have deeper vacua which break R-parity through sneutrino VEVs. We investigate under what conditions the deeper R-parity-violating vacua appear. We find that while previous exploratory work was broadly correct in some of its qualitative conclusions, we disagree in detail.
