Related papers: SuperWIMPs in Supergravity
We propose a novel probe of weakly interacting massive particle (WIMP) dark matter (DM) candidates of a wide mass range which fall short of the required annihilation rates to satisfy correct thermal relic abundance, dubbed as…
Dark matter is approximately five times more abundant than baryonic matter in the universe, but its physical nature continues to elude physicists. One potential candidate for dark matter is a weakly-interacting massive particle (WIMP),…
Motivated by the absence of signals of new physics in both searches for new particles at LHC and for a Weakly Interacting Massive Particle (WIMP) dark matter candidate, we consider a scenario where supersymmetry is broken at a scale above…
After a short review of the arguments for the existence of Particle Dark Matter in the Universe, I list the most plausible candidates provided by particle physics, i.e. neutrinos, axions, and WIMPs. In each case I briefly describe how to…
Gravitino dark matter, together with thermal leptogenesis, implies an upper bound on the masses of superparticles. In the case of broken R-parity the constraints from primordial nucleosynthesis are naturally satisfied and decaying…
We propose a new thermal freeze-out mechanism for ultra-heavy dark matter. Dark matter coannihilates with a lighter unstable species, leading to an annihilation rate that is exponentially enhanced relative to standard WIMPs. This scenario…
A brief review of supersymmetric models and their candidates for dark matter is carried out. The neutralino is a WIMP candidate in the MSSM where $R$-parity is conserved, but this model has the $\mu$ problem. There are natural solutions to…
Recently, both the ATLAS and CMS experiments have observed an excess of events that could be the first evidence for a 125 GeV Higgs boson. We investigate an implication of the CP-even Higgs boson with mass around 125 GeV in the context of…
Non-WIMP dark matter candidates include particles motivated by minimality, candidates motivated by experimental anomalies, and exotic possibilities motivated primarily by the desire of clever iconoclasts to highlight how truly ignorant we…
Supersymmetry offers a cold dark matter candidate, provided that lepton number is {\em not violated by an odd number of units}. On the other hand, lepton number violation by even (two) units gives us an attractive mechanism of neutrino mass…
Although dark matter makes up 80% of the gravitational mass of our Galaxy, its composition is not known. One hypothesis is that dark matter consists of massive particles called WIMPs. WIMPs are expected to accumulate and coannihilate in the…
We show that a star orbiting close enough to an adiabatically grown supermassive black hole can capture a large number of weakly interacting massive particles (WIMPs) during its lifetime. WIMP annihilation energy release in low- to…
Light scalar fields with only gravitational strength couplings are typically present in UV complete theories of physics beyond the Standard Model. In the early universe it is natural for these fields to dominate the energy density, and…
In a non-standard cosmological scenario, heavy, long-lived particles, which we call moduli, dominate the energy density prior to Big Bang Nucleosynthesis. Weakly Interacting Massive Particles (WIMPs) may be produced non-thermally from…
We show that self-annihilating neutralino WIMP dark matter accreted onto neutron stars may provide a mechanism to seed compact objects with long-lived lumps of strange quark matter, or strangelets, for WIMP masses above a few GeV. This…
The Weakly Interacting Massive Particle (WIMP) is the main candidate for the relic dark matter. A set of exclusion curves currently obtained for cross sections of the spin-dependent WIMP-proton and WIMP-neutron interaction is given. A…
We consider supersymmetric theories where the gravitino is the lightest superparticle (LSP). Assuming that the long-lived next-to-lightest superparticle (NSP) is a charged slepton, we investigate two complementary ways to prove the…
Weakly interacting massive particles (WIMPs) can be gravitationally captured by the Sun and trapped in its core. The annihilation of those WIMPs into Standard Model particles produces a spectrum of neutrinos whose energy distribution is…
The gravitino is a promising supersymmetric dark matter candidate, even without strict R-parity conservation. In fact, with some small R-parity violation, gravitinos are sufficiently long-lived to constitute the dark matter of the universe,…
Supersymmetric models provide very interesting scenarios to account for the dark matter of the Universe. In this talk we discuss scenarios with gravitino dark matter in R-parity breaking vacua, which not only reproduce very naturally the…