We investigate the phenomenological implications of a light scalar bottom
quark, with a mass of about the bottom quark mass, within the minimal
supersymmetric standard model. The study of such a scenario is of theoretical
interest, since, depending on their production and decay modes, light sbottoms
may have escaped experimental detection up to now and, in addition, may
naturally appear for large values of \tan\beta. In this article we show that
such a light sbottom cannot be ruled out by the constraints from the
electroweak precision data and the present bound on the lightest CP-even Higgs
boson mass at LEP. It is inferred that a light sbottom scenario requires in
general a relatively light scalar top quark whose mass is typically about the
top-quark mass. It is also shown that under these conditions the lightest
CP-even Higgs boson decays predominantly into scalar bottom quarks in most of
the parameter space and that its mass is restricted to m_h ~< 123 GeV.Comment: 7 pages, 2 figures, LateX. Discussion about fine tuning and
low-energy experiments enlarged. Version to appear in Phys. Rev. Let
