Probing GeV-scale MSSM neutralino dark matter in collider and direct detection experiments

Abstract

Given the recent constraints from the dark matter (DM) direct detections, we examine a light GeV-scale (2-30 GeV) neutralino DM in the alignment limit of the Minimal Supersymmetric Standard Model (MSSM). In this limit without decoupling, the heavy CP-even scalar $H$ plays the role of the Standard Model (SM) Higgs boson while the other scalar $h$ can be rather light so that the DM can annihilate through the $h$ resonance or into a pair of $h$ to achieve the observed relic density. With the current collider and cosmological constraints, we find that such a light neutralino DM above 6 GeV can be excluded by the XENON-1T (2017) limits while the survivied parameter space below 6 GeV can be fully covered by the future germanium-based light dark matter detections (such as CDEX), by the Higgs coupling precison measurements or by the production process $e^+e^- \to hA$ at an electron-positron collider (Higgs factory).

15 pages, 5 figures. Discussions and references added, version accepted by PLB