Implications of a possible 115 GeV supersymmetric Higgs boson on detection and cosmological abundance of relic neutralinos

Abstract

We show that a supersymmetric neutral Higgs boson with a mass of about 115 GeV and with the other prerequisites required by the LEP Higgs events would be compatible with the detection of relic neutralinos in current set-ups for WIMP direct search. Thus this putative Higgs would fit remarkably well in an interpretation in terms of relic neutralinos of the annual-modulation effect recently measured in a WIMP direct experiment. We also show that the cosmological abundance of the relevant neutralinos reaches values of cosmological interest.

Comments: 15 pages, 6 figures, typeset with ReVTeX. The new version containes extended analysis. In order to reduce size, the version on the archive has low-resolution figures. The paper with high-resolution figures can be found at http://www.to.infn.it/~fornengo/papers/