Dark matter sterile neutrinos in stellar collapse: alteration of energy/lepton number transport and a mechanism for supernova explosion enhancement

We investigate matter-enhanced Mikheyev-Smirnov-Wolfenstein (MSW) active-sterile neutrino conversion in the $\nu_e \rightleftharpoons \nu_s$ channel in the collapse of the iron core of a pre-supernova star. For values of sterile neutrino rest mass $m_s$ and vacuum mixing angle $\theta$ (specifically, $0.5 {\rm keV} 5\times{10}^{-12}$) which include those required for viable sterile neutrino dark matter, our one-zone in-fall phase collapse calculations show a significant reduction in core lepton fraction. This would result in a smaller homologous core and therefore a smaller initial shock energy, disfavoring successful shock re-heating and the prospects for an explosion. However, these calculations also suggest that the MSW resonance energy can exhibit a minimum located between the center and surface of the core. In turn, this suggests a post-core-bounce mechanism to enhance neutrino transport and neutrino luminosities at the core surface and thereby augment shock re-heating: (1) scattering-induced or coherent MSW $\nu_e\to\nu_s$ conversion occurs deep in the core, at the first MSW resonance, where $\nu_e$ energies are large ($\sim 150$ MeV); (2) the high energy $\nu_s$ stream outward at near light speed; (3) they deposit their energy when they encounter the second MSW resonance $\nu_s\to\nu_e$ just below the proto-neutron star surface.Comment: 13 pages, 9 figure

Flavour violating bosonic squark decays at LHC

We study quark flavour violation (QFV) in the squark sector of the Minimal Supersymmetric Standard Model (MSSM). We assume mixing between the second and the third squark generations, i.e. sc_R-st_{L,R} mixing mixing. We focus on QFV effects in bosonic squark decays, in particular on the decay into the lightest Higgs boson h0, su_2 -> su_1 h0, where su_{1,2} are the lightest up-type squarks. We show that the branching ratio of this QFV decay can be quite large (up to 50 %) due to large QFV trilinear couplings, and large sc_R-st_{L, R} and st_L-st_R mixing, despite the strong constraints on QFV from B meson data. This can result in characteristic QFV final states with significant rates at LHC (14 TeV), such as pp -> gluino gluino X -> t + h0 + 3jets + Etmiss + X and pp -> gluino gluino X -> t t (or tbar tbar) + h0 + 2jets + Etmiss + X. The QFV bosonic squark decays can have an influence on the squark and gluino searches at LHC.Comment: Figure 3 replaced, Section 4 revise

Universal threshold enhancement

By assuming certain analytic properties of the propagator, it is shown that universal features of the spectral function including threshold enhancement arise if a pole describing a particle at high temperature approaches in the complex energy plane the threshold position of its two-body decay with the variation of T. The case is considered, when one can disregard any other decay processes. The quality of the proposed description is demonstrated by comparing it with the detailed large N solution of the linear sigma model around the pole-threshold coincidence.Comment: 4 pages, 2 figure