Exact Cross Sections for the Neutralino-Slepton Coannihilation

Abstract

Coannihilation processes provide an important additional mechanism for reducing the density of stable relics in the Universe. In the case of the stable lightest neutralino of the MSSM, and in particular the Constrained MSSM (CMSSM), the coannihilation with sleptons plays a major role in opening up otherwise cosmologically excluded ranges of supersymmetric parameters. In this paper, we derive a full set of exact, analytic expressions for the coannihilation of the lightest neutralino with the sleptons into all two--body tree--level final states in the framework of minimal supersymmetry. We make no simplifying assumptions about the neutralino nor about sfermion masses and mixings other than the absence of explicit CP--violating terms and inter--family mixings. The expressions should be particularly useful in computing the neutralino WIMP relic abundance without the approximation of partial wave expansion. We illustrate the effect of our analytic results with numerical examples and demonstrate a sizeable difference with approximate expressions available in the literature.