The Sommerfeld enhancement for scalar particles and application to sfermion co-annihilation regions

We study the impact of the Sommerfeld enhancement on the thermal relic density of the lightest neutralino in the case of large co-annihilation effects with a scalar particle. The proper way of including the Sommerfeld effect in this case is discussed, and the appropriate formulas for a general scenario with a set of particles with arbitrary masses and (off-)diagonal interactions are provided. We implement these results to compute the relic density in the neutralino sfermion co-annihilation regions in the mSUGRA framework. We find non-negligible effects in whole sfermion co-annihilation regimes. For stau co-annihilations the correction to the relic density is of the order of several per cent, while for stop co-annihilations is much larger, reaching a factor of 5 in some regions of the parameter space. A numerical package for computing the neutralino relic density including the Sommerfeld effect in a general MSSM setup is made public available. (C) 2011 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.