SuperWIMP gravitino dark matter from slepton and sneutrino decays

By Jonathan L. Feng, S. Su, F. Takayama. 2004

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Dark matter may be composed of superWIMPs, superweakly-interacting massive particles produced in the late decays of other particles. We focus on the case of gravitinos produced in the late decays of sleptons or sneutrinos and assume they are produced in sufficient numbers to constitute all of nonbaryonic dark matter. At leading order, these late decays are two-body and the accompanying energy is electromagnetic. For natural weak-scale parameters, these decays have been shown to satisfy bounds from Big Bang nucleosynthesis and the cosmic microwave background. However, sleptons and sneutrinos may also decay to three-body final states, producing hadronic energy, which is subject to even more stringent nucleosynthesis bounds. We determine the three-body branching fractions and the resulting hadronic energy release. We find that superWIMP gravitino dark matter is viable and determine the gravitino and slepton/sneutrino masses preferred by this solution to the dark matter problem. In passing, we note that hadronic constraints disfavor the possibility of superWIMPs produced by neutralino decays unless the neutralino is photinolike.

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics, Nuclear and High Energy Physics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/4629f6932eee527ea20a2eecf880349668b5995e

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Citations in the corpus

Cosmological constraints on exotic injection of electromagnetic energy (2016, background): “For instance, decaying massive particles can be the progenitors of the DM in ‘superWIMP’ models [1], or the DM itself can be unstable, provided its lifetime is much longer than the lifetime of the universe, as in R-parity breaking SUSY models (see e.”
Lyman-alpha constraints on warm and on warm-plus-cold dark matter models (2008, background): “For example, in gravitino models with broken R-parity, gravitino production occurs in two stages: thermally at high temperatures (see e.g. [73, 74, 75]), and then non-thermally through the late decay of the next-tolightest supersymmetric particle (see e.g. [76, 69]).”
Dark Matter Candidates from Particle Physics and Methods of Detection (2010, background): “Constraints from BBN on hadronic energy release essentially exclude the neutralino WIMP scenario, allowing only the fine-tuned case in which the neutralino is photino-like, χ ≈ γ̃, in which case the decays to ZG̃ and hG̃ are suppressed (160; 161).”