2014/04/30 by D. G. Cerdeño, D. G. Cerdeno, Miguel Peiró +3 · 4 citations
Physics and Astronomy · #Anomalous magnetic dipole moment #Astrophysics #Cosmology #Dark Matter and Cosmic Phenomena #Dark energy #Dark matter #Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope #Higgs boson #Higgs sector #Minimal Supersymmetric Standard Model #Muon #Neutrino Physics Research #Nuclear physics #Particle physics #Particle physics theoretical and experimental studies #Physics #Scalar field dark matter #WIMP #Weakly interacting massive particles #astro-ph.CO #hep-ph
paper · pdf · doi:10.1088/1475-7516/2014/08/005
published as JCAP 08 (2014) 005 · 31 pages, 13 figures. Discussion extended, matches JCAP accepted version
arxiv created 2014/07/26 · openalex publication_date 2014/08/01 · arxiv updated 2014/08/05 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/08/06
Recent results from direct and indirect searches for dark matter (DM) have motivated the study of particle physics models that can provide weakly interacting massive particles (WIMPs) in the mass range 1–50 GeV. Viable candidates for light WIMP DM must fulfil stringent constraints. On the one hand, the observation at the LHC of a Higgs boson with Standard Model properties set an upper bound on the coupling of light DM particles to the Higgs, thereby making it difficult to reproduce the correct relic abundance. On the other hand, the recent results from direct searches in the CDMSlite, SuperCDMS and LUX experiments have set upper constraints on the DM scattering cross section. In this paper, we investigate the viability of light right-handed sneutrino DM in the Next-to-Minimal Supersymmetric Model (NMSSM) in the light of these constraints. To this aim, we have carried out a scan in the NMSSM parameter space, imposing experimental bounds on the Higgs sector and low-energy observables, such as the muon anomalous magnetic moment and branching ratios of rare decays. We demonstrate that the enlarged Higgs sector of the NMSSM, together with the flexibility provided by the RH sneutrino parameters, make it possible to obtain viable RH sneutrino DM with a mass as light as 2 GeV. We have also considered the upper bounds on the annihilation cross section from Fermi LAT data on dwarf spheroidal galaxies, and extracted specific examples with mass in the range 8–50 GeV that could account for the apparent low-energy excess in the gamma-ray emission at the Galactic Centre. Then, we have computed the theoretical predictions for the elastic scattering cross-section of RH sneutrinos. Finally, after imposing the recent bounds from SuperCDMS and LUX, we have found a wide area of the parameter space that could be probed by future low-threshold direct detection experiments.