Radiative corrections to stop-antistop annihilation into gluons and light quarks

TL;DR

This paper calculates full one-loop SUSY-QCD corrections, including Sommerfeld effects, to stop-antistop annihilation into gluons and light quarks, significantly impacting dark matter relic density predictions.

Contribution

It provides the first comprehensive calculation of radiative corrections with Sommerfeld enhancement for stop-antistop annihilation in the MSSM, implemented in DM@NLO.

Findings

Corrections can decrease relic density by over 10%.

Sommerfeld effect dominates the radiative corrections.

Pure NLO correction is below 3%.

Abstract

We present the full one-loop SUSY-QCD corrections to stop-antistop annihilation into gluons and light quarks within the Minimal Supersymmetric Standard Model including Sommerfeld enhancement effects from the exchange of multiple gluons between the incoming particles. These corrections are important as stop (co)annihilation becomes the dominant contribution to the relic density for scenarios with a small mass difference between the neutralino and the stop which are less constrained by current LHC searches and consistent with the observation of a 125 GeV SM-like Higgs boson. We discuss important technical details of our one-loop, real emission, and resummation calculations where we pay particular attention to the cancellation of infrared divergences and the associated application of the dipole formalism for massive initial scalars. The corrections have been implemented in the dark matter precision tool DM@NLO which allows us to study numerically the impact of these corrections on the annihilation cross section. We find that for the chosen reference scenario the dominant correction comes from the Sommerfeld effect and that the pure NLO correction is below 3%. The inclusion of these radiative corrections is still large enough to decrease the relic density by more than 10% and shift the cosmologically preferred parameter region by a few GeV relative to the standard MicrOMEGAs result. Therefore, the inclusion of these corrections is mandatory if the experimental errors are taken as upper and lower bounds of the theory value.