A survey for low stau yields in the MSSM

Abstract

We study the implications of LHC results for the abundance of long-lived staus after freeze-out from thermal equilibrium in a super-WIMP dark matter scenario. We classify regions in the MSSM parameter space according to the stau yield, considering all possible co-annihilation effects as well as the effects of resonances and large Higgs-sfermion couplings. Afterwards, we examine the viability of these regions after imposing experimental and theoretical constraints, in particular a Higgs mass around 125 GeV and null-searches for heavy stable charged particles (HSCP) at the LHC. We work in a pMSSM framework and perform a Monte Carlo scan over the parameter space. To interpret the HSCP searches in our scenario, we consider all potentially important superparticle production processes, developing a fast estimator for NLO cross sections for electroweak and strong production at the LHC. After applying all constraints, we find that stau yields below 10-14 occur only for resonant annihilation via a heavy Higgs in combination with either co-annihilation or large left-right stau mixing. We encounter allowed points with yields as low as 2 × 10-16, thus satisfying limits from big bang nucleosynthesis even for large stau lifetimes. © 2014 The Author(s).