Prospects of antideuteron detection from dark matter annihilations or decays at AMS-02 and GAPS
- Physik-Department T30d, Technische Universität München, James-Franck-Straße, 85748 Garching (Germany)
The search for cosmic antideuterons has been proposed as a promising method to indirectly detect dark matter, due to the very small background flux from spallations expected at the energies relevant to experiments. The antideuteron flux from dark matter annihilations or decays is, however, severely constrained by the non-observation of an excess in the antiproton-to-proton fraction measured by PAMELA. In this paper we calculate, for representative dark matter annihilation and decay channels, upper limits on the number of antideuteron events at AMS-02 and GAPS from requiring that the associated antiproton flux is in agreement with the PAMELA data. To this end, we first analyze in detail the formation of antideuterons in the coalescence model using an event-by-event Monte Carlo simulation and using data from various high energy experiments. We find that the resulting coalescence momentum shows a dependence on the underlying process and on the center of mass energy involved. Then, we calculate, using a diffusion model, the flux of antideuterons at the Earth from dark matter annihilations or decays. Our results indicate that, despite the various sources of uncertainty, the observation of an antideuteron flux at AMS-02 or GAPS from dark matter annihilations or decays will be challenging.
- OSTI ID:
- 22283020
- Journal Information:
- Journal of Cosmology and Astroparticle Physics, Vol. 2013, Issue 02; Other Information: Country of input: International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA); ISSN 1475-7516
- Country of Publication:
- United States
- Language:
- English
Similar Records
Antideuterons from dark matter decay
Antideuterons in cosmic rays: sources and discovery potential