Supernovas and light neutralinos: SN 1987A bounds on supersymmetry reexamined

Abstract

For nonuniversal gaugino masses, collider experiments do not provide any lower bound on the mass of the lightest neutralino. We review the supersymmetric parameter space which leads to light neutralinos, ${M}_{\stackrel{\ifmmode \tilde{}\else \~{}\fi{}}{\ensuremath{\chi}}}\ensuremath{\lesssim}O(1\mathrm{GeV}),$ and find that such neutralinos are almost pure bino. In light of this, we examine the neutralino lower mass bound obtained from supernova 1987A (SN 1987A). We consider the production of binos in both electron-positron annihilation and nucleon-nucleon binostrahlung. For electron-positron annihilation, we take into account the radial and temporal dependence of the temperature and degeneracy of the supernova core. We also separately consider the Raffelt criterion and show that the two lead to consistent results. For the case of bino production in nucleon-nucleon collisions, we use the Raffelt criterion and incorporate recent advances in the understanding of the strong-interaction part of the calculation in order to estimate the impact of bino radiation on the SN 1987A neutrino signal. Considering these two bino production channels allows us to determine separate and combined limits on the neutralino mass as a function of the selectron and squark masses. For ${M}_{\stackrel{\ifmmode \tilde{}\else \~{}\fi{}}{\ensuremath{\chi}}}\ensuremath{\sim}100\mathrm{MeV}$ values of the selectron mass between 300 and 900 GeV are inconsistent with the supernova neutrino signal. On the other hand, in contrast to previous works, we find that SN 1987A provides almost no bound on the squark masses: only a small window of values around 300 GeV can be excluded and even then this window closes once ${M}_{\stackrel{\ifmmode \tilde{}\else \~{}\fi{}}{\ensuremath{\chi}}}\ensuremath{\gtrsim}20\mathrm{MeV}.$