Dark matter particles could be superheavy, provided their lifetime is much longer than the age of the Universe. Using the sensitivity of the Pierre Auger Observatory to ultrahigh energy neutrinos and photons, we constrain a specific extension of the Standard Model of particle physics that meets the lifetime requirement for a superheavy particle by coupling it to a sector of ultralight sterile neutrinos. Our results show that, for a typical dark coupling constant of 0.1, the mixing anglebetween active and sterile neutrinos must satisfy, roughly,for a massof the dark-matter particle betweenand.
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Implications of purity constraints on light Higgsinos
The lightest supersymmetric particles could be Higgsinos that have a small mixing with gauginos. If the lightest Higgsino-like state makes up some or all of the dark matter with a thermal freeze-out density, then its mass must be between about 100 GeV and 1150 GeV, and dark matter searches put bounds on the amount of gaugino contamination that it can have. Motivated by the generally good agreement of flavor- and-violating observables with Standard Model predictions, I consider models in which the scalar particles of minimal supersymmetry are heavy enough to be essentially decoupled, except for the 125 GeV Higgs boson. I survey the resulting purity constraints as lower bounds on the gaugino masses and upper bounds on the Higgsino mass splittings. I also discuss the mild excesses in recent soft lepton searches for charginos and neutralinos at the LHC, and show that they can be accommodated in these models ifis small andis negative.
- Award ID(s):
- 2310533
- PAR ID:
- 10511498
- Publisher / Repository:
- https://journals.aps.org/prd/abstract/10.1103/PhysRevD.109.095045
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- Physical Review D
- Volume:
- 109
- Issue:
- 9
- ISSN:
- 2470-0010
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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