2004/05/31 by A. Brandenburg, Arnd Brandenburg, Frank Daniel Steffen · 2 citations
Physics and Astronomy · #Axion #Cosmology and Gravitation Theories #Dark Matter and Cosmic Phenomena #Dark matter #Gluino #Lightest Supersymmetric Particle #Minimal Supersymmetric Standard Model #Neutralino #Particle physics #Particle physics theoretical and experimental studies #Physics #Quantum chromodynamics #R-parity #Resummation #Superpartner #Supersymmetry #astro-ph #hep-ph
paper · pdf · doi:10.1088/1475-7516/2004/08/008
published as JCAP 0408 (2004) 008 · 33 pages, 7 figures, 1 table, erratum added
openalex publication_date 2004/08/13 · arxiv created 2009/03/16 · arxiv updated 2009/12/01 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/08/05
The axino is a promising candidate for dark matter in the Universe. It is electrically and colour neutral, very weakly interacting, and could be—as assumed in this study—the lightest supersymmetric particle, which is stable for unbroken R -parity. In supersymmetric extensions of the standard model, in which the strong CP problem is solved via the Peccei–Quinn mechanism, the axino arises naturally as the fermionic superpartner of the axion. We compute the thermal production rate of axinos in supersymmetric QCD. Using hard thermal loop resummation, we obtain a finite result in a gauge-invariant way, which takes into account Debye screening in the hot quark–gluon–squark–gluino plasma. The relic axino abundance from thermal scatterings after inflation is evaluated. We find that thermally produced axinos could provide the dominant part of cold dark matter, for example, for an axino mass of keV and a reheating temperature of GeV.