Supernovae and Light Neutralinos: SN1987A Bounds on Supersymmetry Revisited

Abstract

For non-universal gaugino masses, collider experiments do not provide any lower bound on the mass of the lightest neutralino. We review the supersymmetric parameter space which leads to light neutralinos, $M_\lsp \lsim {\cal O}(1\gev)$, and find that such neutralinos are almost pure bino. In light of this, we examine the neutralino lower mass bound obtained from supernova 1987A (SN1987A). We consider the production of binos in both electron-positron annihilation and nucleon-nucleon binostrahlung. For electron-positron annihilation, we take into account the radial and temporal dependence of the temperature and degeneracy of the supernova core. We also separately consider the Raffelt criterion and show that the two lead to consistent results. For the case of bino production in $NN$ collisions, we use the Raffelt criterion and incorporate recent advances in the understanding of the strong-interaction part of the calculation in order to estimate the impact of bino radiation on the SN1987A neutrino signal. Considering these two bino production channels allows us to determine separate and combined limits on the neutralino mass as a function of the selectron and squark masses. For $M_\lsp \sim 100 \mev$ values of the selectron mass between 300 and 900 GeV are inconsistent with the supernova neutrino signal. On the other hand, in contrast to previous works, we find that SN1987A provides almost no bound on the squark masses: only a small window of values around 300 GeV can be excluded, and even then this window closes once $M_\lsp \gsim 20 \mev$.