No Arabic abstract
We investigate the so-called superWIMP scenario with gravitino as the lightest supersymmetric particle (LSP) in the context of non-standard cosmology, in particular, brane world cosmology. As a candidate of the next-to-LSP (NLSP), we examine slepton and sneutrino. Brane world cosmological effects dramatically enhance the relic density of the slepton or sneutrino NLSP, so that the NLSP with mass of order 100 GeV can provide the correct abundance of gravitino dark matter through its decay. We find that with an appropriate five dimensional Planck mass, this scenario can be realized consistently with the constraints from Big Bang Nucleosynthesis (BBN) for both NLSP candidates of slepton and sneutrino. The BBN constraints for slepton NLSP are more stringent than that for sneutrino, as the result, the gravitino must be rather warm in the slepton NLSP case. The energy density of gravitino produced by thermal scattering is highly suppressed and negligible due to the brane world cosmological effects.
We study the possibility of improving the constraints on the lifetime of gravitino dark matter in scenarios with bilinear R-parity violation by estimating the amount of cosmic-ray antideuterons that can be produced in gravitino decays. Taking into account all different sources of theoretical uncertainties, we find that the margin of improvement beyond the limits already set by cosmic-ray antiproton data are quite narrow and unachievable for the next generation of experiments. However, we also identify more promising energy ranges for future experiments.
We discuss a simple model of thermal relic dark matter whose mass can be much larger than the so-called unitarity limit on the mass of point-like particle dark matter. The model consists of new strong dynamics with one flavor of fermions in the fundamental representation which is much heavier than the dynamical scale of the new strong dynamics. Dark matter is identified with the lightest baryonic hadron of the new dynamics. The baryonic hadrons annihilate into the mesonic hadrons of the new strong dynamics when they have large radii. Resultantly, thermal relic dark matter with a mass in the PeV range is possible.
We examine the vector-portal inelastic dark matter (DM) model with DM mass $m_chi$ and dark photon mass $m_{A}$, in the `forbidden dark matter regime where $1 lesssim m_{A}/m_chi lesssim 2$, carefully tracking the dark sector temperature throughout freezeout. The inelastic nature of the dark sector relaxes the stringent cosmic microwave background (CMB) and self-interaction constraints compared to symmetric DM models. We determine the CMB limits on both annihilations involving excited states and annihilation into $e^+e^-$ through initial-state-radiation of an $A$, as well as limits on the DM self-scattering, which proceeds at the one-loop level. The unconstrained parameter space serves as an ideal target for accelerator $A$ searches, and provides a DM self-interaction cross section that is large enough to observably impact small-scale structure.
The gravitino in models with a small violation of R-parity is a well-motivated decaying dark matter candidate that leads to a cosmological scenario that is consistent with big bang nucleosynthesis and thermal leptogenesis. The gravitino lifetime is cosmologically long-lived since its decays are suppressed by the Planck-scale as well as the small R-parity violating parameter. We discuss the signals in different cosmic-ray species coming from the decay of gravitino dark matter, namely gamma rays, positrons, antiprotons, antideuterons and neutrinos. Comparison to cosmic-ray data can be used to constrain the parameters of the model.
Gravitino Dark Matter represents a compelling scenario in Supersymmetry, which brings together a variety of data from cosmology and collider physics. We discuss the constraints obtained from the LHC on supersymmetric models with gravitino dark matter and neutralino NLSP, which is the case most difficult to disentangle at colliders from a neutralino LSP forming DM. The phenomenological SUSY model with 19+1 free parameters is adopted. Results are obtained from broad scans of the phase space of these uncorrelated parameters. The relation between gravitino mass, gluino mass and reheating temperature as well as the derived constraints on these parameters are discussed in detail. This relation offers a unique opportunity to place stringent bounds on the cosmological model, within the gravitino dark matter scenario, from the results of the LHC searches in Run-2 and the planned High-Luminosity upgrade.