Is the Light Neutralino Dark Matter Still Viable in the MSSM After the LZ-2024 Results?
Abstract
In the Minimal Supersymmetric Standard Model with heavy sfermions, a sub-hundred-GeV Bino-like neutralino can thermally achieve the observed dark matter abundance only through h- or Z-resonant annihilation. Since the couplings governing these resonances simultaneously determine the spin-independent and spin-dependent scattering off nucleons, reproducing the relic density imposes irreducible lower envelopes on the scattering cross sections. We evaluate these bounds including the complete one-loop corrections to these vertices, which enhance the direct-detection rates by up to 50% and 30%, respectively, adopt the FLAG-2024 nucleon matrix elements with their most adverse 3σ shifts, and confront the predictions with a likelihood-based recast of the LZ data. We find that the LZ-2024 results exclude both resonant scenarios at conservative one-sided significances exceeding 5.9σ and 4.1σ, respectively, irrespective of whether the neutralino constitutes all or only part of the dark matter, and independently of LHC electroweakino searches.
Related
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BibTeX
@misc{bao2026light,
title = {{Is the Light Neutralino Dark Matter Still Viable in the MSSM After the LZ-2024 Results?}},
author = {Zhiyang Bao and Subhadip Bisal and Junjie Cao},
howpublished = {arXiv},
year = {2026},
month = oct,
doi = {10.48550/arxiv.2610.10219},
eprint = {2610.10219},
archivePrefix = {arXiv},
url = {https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.10219},
note = {CC BY 4.0},
}
RIS
TY - UNPB
TI - Is the Light Neutralino Dark Matter Still Viable in the MSSM After the LZ-2024 Results?
AU - Zhiyang Bao
AU - Subhadip Bisal
AU - Junjie Cao
PY - 2026
DA - 2026/10/07
PB - arXiv
DO - 10.48550/arxiv.2610.10219
UR - https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.10219
AB - In the Minimal Supersymmetric Standard Model with heavy sfermions, a sub-hundred-GeV Bino-like neutralino can thermally achieve the observed dark matter abundance only through h- or Z-resonant annihilation. Since the couplings governing these resonances simultaneously determine the spin-independent and spin-dependent scattering off nucleons, reproducing the relic density imposes irreducible lower envelopes on the scattering cross sections. We evaluate these bounds including the complete one-loop corrections to these vertices, which enhance the direct-detection rates by up to 50% and 30%, respectively, adopt the FLAG-2024 nucleon matrix elements with their most adverse 3σ shifts, and confront the predictions with a likelihood-based recast of the LZ data. We find that the LZ-2024 results exclude both resonant scenarios at conservative one-sided significances exceeding 5.9σ and 4.1σ, respectively, irrespective of whether the neutralino constitutes all or only part of the dark matter, and independently of LHC electroweakino searches.
ER -