Supersymmetric Dark Matter in the Light of LEP 1.5

Abstract

We discuss the lower limit on the mass of the neutralino $\chi$ that can be obtained by combining data from $e^+e^-$ annihilation at LEP and elsewhere with astrophysical and theoretical considerations. Loopholes in the purely experimental analysis of ALEPH data from the Z peak and LEP 1.5, which appear when $\mu<0$ for certain values of the sneutrino mass $m_{\tilde\nu}$ and the ratio $\tan\beta$ of supersymmetric Higgs vacuum expectation values, may be largely or totally excluded by data from lower-energy $e^+e^-$ data, the hypothesis that most of the cosmological dark matter consists of $\chi$ particles, and the assumption that electroweak symmetry breaking is triggered by radiative corrections due to a heavy top quark. The combination of these inputs imposes $m_{\chi} \ge 21.4~\gev$, if soft supersymmetry-breaking masses are assumed to be universal at the grand-unification scale.