Tuesday, October 13, 2009

A purely supersymmetric origin of neutrino mass

Yesterday I came to know about a completely supersymmetric(SUSY) origin of tiny neutrino mass, that is, in the non-SUSY version of the model neutrino mass remains either zero or comparable to lepton/quark masses. This comes when neutrino mixes with the neutralinos in the Supersymmetric model. The neutralinos are the mass eigenstates of neutral gauginos as well as Higgsinos. Neutrinos can mix with the neutralinos only if the sneutrino field get a vacuum expectation value (vev). Diagonalizing the mixing mass matrix will give rise to a small neutrino mass by sutable adjustment of different scales. However since neutrino/sneutrino carry a lepton number whereas neutralinos do not, such mixing violate R-parity. This R-parity violation however should not lead to dangerous proton decay, but it will make the standard neutralinos decay into neutrinos. If neutralino is to be a dark matter candidate, the relic abundance will put a constraint on the R-parity violation. Thus this scenario will be tightly constrained by smallness of neutrino mass as well as dark matter relic abundance. I am trying to see if there is any other advantage of this approach, say from the point of view of recent positron excess measured by various dark matter indirect detection probes.

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