Thermal relic density

Date: 2015-10-07; view: 468.

We now want to apply the general formalism above to the specific case of neutralinos. This is complicated by the fact that neutralinos may annihilate to many final states: , W⁺W⁻, ZZ, Zh, hh, and states including the heavy Higgs bosons H, A, and H^±. Many processes contribute to each of these final states, and nearly every supersymmetry parameter makes an appearance in at least one process. The full set of annihilation diagrams is discussed in [18]. Codes to calculate the relic density are publicly available [19].

Given this complicated picture, it is not surprising that there are a variety of ways to achieve the desired relic density for neutralino dark matter. What is surprising, however, is that many of these different ways may be found in minimal supergravity, provided one looks hard enough. We will therefore consider various regions of minimal supergravity parameter space where qualitatively distinct mechanisms lead to neutralino dark matter with the desired thermal relic density.