Origins and renormalization of the superparticle spectrum

The importance of Yukawa contributions to the renormalization of the spectrum in non-minimal supersymmetric models is illustrated in the cases of explicit lepton number violation (leading to the possibility of singly produced sneutrinos at LEP energies), an intermediate scale singlet neutrino and negative mass squared parameters (possibly modifying fine-tuning considerations), and a grand-unified sector. The relevance of model-dependent renormalization to the supersymmetric flavor problem is emphasized. Sources of the flavor problem, some of which are newly identified, as well as possible solutions, are discussed and classified. It is then shown that gravitational interactions could lead (via a quadratically divergent singlet) to simple realizations of some of the low-energy frameworks that attempt to resolve the flavor problem.