Light neutralino dark matter can be achieved in the Minimal Supersymmetric Standard Model if staus are rather light, with mass around 100 GeV. We perform a detailed analysis of the relevant supersymmetric parameter space, including also the possibility of light selectons and smuons, and of light higgsino- or wino-like charginos. In addition to the latest limits from direct and indirect detection of dark matter, ATLAS and CMS constraints on electroweak-inos and on sleptons are taken into account using a "simplified models" framework. Measurements of the properties of the Higgs boson at 125 GeV, which constrain amongst others the invisible decay of the Higgs boson into a pair of neutralinos, are also implemented in the analysis. We show that viable neutralino dark matter can be achieved for masses as low as 15 GeV. In this case, light charginos close to the LEP bound are required in addition to light right-chiral staus. Significant deviations are observed in the couplings of the 125 GeV Higgs boson. These constitute a promising way to probe the light neutralino dark matter scenario in the next run of the LHC.Comment: 18 pages, 6 figures; matches version accepted for publication in Physics Letters

After the discovery of a scalar resonance, resembling the Higgs boson, its couplings have been extensively studied via the measurement of various production and decay channels on the invariant mass peak. Recently, it has been suggested the possibility to use off-shell measurements: in particular, CMS has published results based on the highinvariant mass cross section of the process gg → ZZ, which contains the contribution of the Higgs. While this measurement has been interpreted as a constraint on the Higgs width after very specific assumptions are taken on the Higgs couplings, in this letter we show that a much more model-independent interpretation is possible.Since the discovery of a scalar boson at the LHC by the ATLAS and CMS collaborations, much effort has been devoted to the study of its properties. So far, most of the information has been obtained by extracting its couplings from the cross-section measurements in various production/decay modes on the resonance peak [1,2]. Interpreting those results in a Beyond the Standard Model (BSM) context can be easily done in terms of a handful of parameters encoding the modification of the couplings to standard particles and, among the many proposals, one has been chosen as an official recommendation by experimentalists and theorists together [3]. Recently, a novel kind of measurement has been put forward, where Higgs couplings are extracted from the cross-section integrated away from the resonance peak [4][5][6], and the first results from CMS on the H → ZZ → 4 leptons have been published [7]. This new class of measurements is most welcome, since it carries information on the Higgs couplings at a different mass scale than its mass shell, and such a dependence on the partonic centre of mass energy √ŝ is paramount to distinguishing BSM effects. Although