Constraints on minimal SUSY models with warm dark matter neutralinos

If the energy density of the Universe before nucleosynthesis is dominated by a scalar field phi that decays and reheats the plasma to a low reheating temperature T-RH, neutralinos may be warm dark matter particles. We study this possibility and derive the conditions on the production mechanism and on the supersymmetric spectrum for which it is viable. Large values of the mu parameter and of the slepton masses are characteristic features of these models. We compute the expected direct detection cross sections and point out that split-SUSY provides a natural framework for neutralino warm dark matter. (c) 2006 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.