Impact of squark flavour violation on neutralino dark matter

Abstract

We discuss the possibility of new sources of flavour violation in the squark sector of supersymmetric models in the context of the dark matter relic density. We show that the corresponding non-minimal flavour violation terms in the squark mass matrices can have an important impact on the thermally averaged (co)annihilation cross section of the neutralino, and in consequence can modify its predicted relic density. We discuss in detail the relevant effects and present a numerical study of neutralino annihilation and coannihilation in this context. We also comment on the LHC phenomenology of the corresponding scenarios.