Speaker
Dr
Stefano Profumo
(Caltech and UC Santa Cruz)
Description
The discovery of a long-lived charged particle at future colliders can point towards
scenarios where the dark matter (DM) particle is superweakly interacting, and the
next-to-lightest particle (NLP) is charged and quasi-stable. Such a situation is
expected in several supersymmetric models, including gauge mediation and even minimal
supergravity, where the DM particle is the gravitino and the charged NLP is the
lightest stau. Probing the nature, and directly detecting
the DM particle can be, in this case, extremely challenging. One, if not the only
handle one would have is to detect with neutrino telescopes the charged NLP's
produced in high energy neutrino collisions with nuclei. Previous studies focused on
the production of staus from extra-galactic neutrinos, whose flux is, however,
largely uncertain and has not been detected yet. In the present analysis, we study
the production of charged NLP's from conventional atmospheric neutrinos and from
neutrinos originating from the prompt decay of heavy quarks. We quantify and compare
the resulting stau fluxes with what expected from extra-galactic neutrinos. We
analyze the dependence of the stau flux on the underlying supersymmetric setup, and
point out that even if the extra-galactic flux is very suppressed, prompt decay
neutrinos can still provide a sufficient flux of staus at IceCube. We also comment on
the flux of charged NLP's expected from proton-proton collisions, and show that it is
typically subdominant, and always
below detectable rates.
Author
Dr
Stefano Profumo
(Caltech and UC Santa Cruz)
