Interactions that manifest themselves as lepton number violating processes at low energies in combination with sphaleron transitions typically erase any preexisting baryon asymmetry of the Universe. In this article, we discuss the constraints obtaine
d from an observation of neutrinoless double beta decay in this context. If a new physics mechanism of neutrinoless double beta decay other than the standard light neutrino exchange is observed, typical scenarios of high-scale baryogenesis will be excluded unless the baryon asymmetry is stabilized via some new mechanism. We also sketch how this conclusion can be extended beyond the first lepton generation by incorporating lepton flavor violating processes.
We discuss the ${cal O}(alpha_s)$ supersymmetric QCD corrections to neutralino-stop coannihilation into a top quark and a gluon in the Minimal Supersymmetric Standard Model (MSSM). This particular channel can be numerically important in wide ranges o
f the MSSM parameter space with rather light stops. We discuss technical details such as the renormalization scheme and the phase-space slicing method with two cutoffs. We also comment on improvements with respect to earlier works on the given process. Further, we study for the first time the phenomenologically very interesting interplay of neutralino-stop coannihilation with neutralino-pair annihilation into quark pairs taking the full next-to-leading order SUSY-QCD corrections into account. We demonstrate that the numerical impact of these corrections on the total (co)annihilation cross section and finally on the theoretically predicted neutralino relic density is significant.
We have calculated the full O(alpha_s) supersymmetric QCD corrections to neutralino-stop co-annihilation into electroweak vector and Higgs bosons within the Minimal Supersymmetric Standard Model (MSSM). We performed a parameter study within the pheno
menological MSSM and demonstrated that the studied co-annihilation processes are phenomenologically relevant, especially in the context of a 126 GeV Higgs-like particle. By means of an example scenario we discuss the effect of the full next-to-leading order corrections on the co-annihilation cross section and show their impact on the predicted neutralino relic density. We demonstrate that the impact of these corrections on the cosmologically preferred region of parameter space is larger than the current experimental uncertainty of WMAP data.
