Neutralino Proton Cross Section and Dark Matter Detection

Abstract

We consider the neutralino proton cross section for detection of Milky Way dark matter for a number of supergravity models with gauge unification at the GUT scale: models with universal soft breaking (mSUGRA), models with nonuniversal soft breaking, and string inspired D-brane models. The parameter space examined includes m_{1/2}<1 TeV and tan \beta < 50, and the recent Higgs bound of m_h >114 GeV is imposed. (For grand unified models, this bound is to be imposed for all tan \beta.) All coannihilation effects are included as well as the recent NLO corrections to b\to s\gamma for large tan \beta, and coannihilation effects are shown to be sensitive to A_0 for large tan \beta. In all models, current detectors are sampling parts of the paramater space i. e. tan \beta >~ 25 for mSUGRA, tan \beta >~ 7 for nonuniversal models, and tan \beta>~ 20 for D-brane models. Future detectors should be able to cover almost the full parameter space for \mu > 0. For \mu< 0, cancellations can occur for m_{1/2} >~ 450 GeV, allowing the cross sections to become ~< 10^{-10} pb for limited ranges of tan\beta. (The positions of these cancellations are seen to be sensitive to the value of \sigma_{\pi N}.) In this case, the gluino and squarks lie above 1 TeV, but still should be accessible to the LHC if m_{1/2} <1 TeV.