Higgs boson mass and thermal wino dark matter from Starobinsky supergravity with the MSSM

Abstract

We propose a framework connecting cosmic microwave background (CMB) observables with high-energy particle phenomenology, based on Starobinsky supergravity coupled to the Minimal Supersymmetric Standard Model (MSSM). Cosmic inflation and supersymmetry (SUSY) breaking occur within the hidden sector emerging from Starobinsky supergravity. The inflationary scale sets the hidden-sector mass scale and, via gravitational mediation of SUSY breaking, the MSSM soft terms. The same hidden sector can also dynamically generate a high-scale $\mu$ term. The resulting MSSM spectrum fixes the high-scale threshold corrections and the boundary conditions for the renormalisation-group (RG) evolution of the Higgs quartic coupling. Three-loop RG evolution of the Higgs quartic coupling gives a Higgs boson mass consistent with the measured value within the theoretical and experimental uncertainties, thereby linking the amplitude of primordial scalar perturbations to the Higgs boson mass. With conserved R-parity, the lightest supersymmetric particle is stable, and the minimal framework developed here points to a nearly pure neutral wino as the dark-matter (DM) candidate. In the thermal-relic scenario, the observed abundance selects a wino mass of about $3$ TeV. Recent gamma-ray analyses exclude it as the sole DM component, even for conservative cored Galactic profiles. Alternatives include a subdominant wino fraction or late entropy dilution. Its loop-induced spin-independent wino-nucleon scattering cross section lies below current LUX-ZEPLIN sensitivity but within reach of next-generation liquid-xenon detectors. Electroweak corrections generate a small charged-neutral wino mass splitting, producing a long-lived charged wino and disappearing-track signature. A future $100$ TeV proton collider can discover the corresponding pure-wino signal or exclude the scenario independently of its cosmological abundance.

Comments: 34 pages, 6 figures. LaTeX; minor revisions; references added