Speaker
Description
We study an MSSM scenario in which the only light sparticles are a bino-like
dark matter candidate, and one or more light-flavored squarks. We find that this
scenario has several interesting phenomenological features. In particular, LHC
searches for the light squarks have reduced sensitivity, since the visible and
invisible products tend to be softer. Moreover, bino-squark co-annihilation can
allow even relatively heavy dark matter candidates to be consistent thermal relics.
Finally, the dark matter nucleon scattering cross section is enhanced in the
squeezed limit, allowing direct detection experiments to use both spin-independent
and spin-dependent scattering to probe regions of parameter space beyond the those
probed by the LHC. Although we have phrased this study in terms of the MSSM, the
results generalize to models in which a gauge-singlet Majorana fermion dark matter candidate
interacts with quarks via new charged scalars.
