Electroweak Loop Contributions to the Direct Detection of Wino Dark Matter

TL;DR

This paper investigates how electroweak loop corrections can significantly enhance the direct detection prospects of wino dark matter, especially in specific supersymmetry models, potentially making it detectable in future experiments.

Contribution

It demonstrates that electroweak loop corrections can substantially increase the spin-independent scattering cross section of wino dark matter, impacting detection strategies.

Findings

Electroweak loops can dominate the scattering rate in certain models.

Constructive interference lifts the cross section above neutrino background.

Potential detectability in next-generation dark matter experiments.

Abstract

Electroweak loop corrections to the matrix elements for the spin-independent scattering of cold dark matter particles on nuclei are generally small, typically below the uncertainty in the local density of cold dark matter. However, as shown in this paper, there are instances in which the electroweak loop corrections are relatively large, and change significantly the spin-independent dark matter scattering rate. An important example occurs when the dark matter particle is a wino, e.g., in anomaly-mediated supersymmetry breaking (AMSB) and pure gravity mediation (PGM) models. We find that the one-loop electroweak corrections to the spin-independent wino LSP scattering cross section generally interfere constructively with the tree-level contribution for AMSB models with negative Higgsino mixing, $\mu < 0$, and in PGM-like models for both signs of $\mu$, lifting the cross section out of the neutrino fog and into a range that is potentially detectable in the next generation of direct searches for cold dark matter scattering.