Decaying Dark Matter as a Probe of Unification and TeV Spectroscopy

Abstract

In supersymmetric unified theories the dark matter particle can decay, just like the proton, through grand unified interactions with a lifetime of order of 10^{26} sec. Its decay products can be detected by several experiments -- including Fermi, HESS, PAMELA, ATIC, and IceCube -- opening our first direct window to physics at the TeV scale and simultaneously at the unification scale 10^{16} GeV. We consider possibilities for explaining the electron/positron spectra observed by HESS, PAMELA, and ATIC, and the resulting predictions for the gamma-ray, electron/positron, and neutrino spectra as will be measured, for example, by Fermi and IceCube. The discovery of an isotropic, hard gamma ray spectral feature at Fermi would be strong evidence for dark matter and would disfavor astrophysical sources such as pulsars. Substructure in the cosmic ray spectra probes the spectroscopy of new TeV-mass particles. For example, a preponderance of electrons in the final state can result from the lightness of selectrons relative to squarks. Decaying dark matter acts as a sparticle injector with an energy reach potentially higher than the LHC. The resulting cosmic ray flux depends only on the values of the weak and unification scales.

7 pages, 5 figures, 1 table, New Refs added

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Cited by in corpus (14)

• Constraining Very Heavy Dark Matter Using Diffuse Backgrounds of Neutrinos and Cascaded Gamma Rays
• Nonabelian dark matter: models and constraints
• R-violating Decay of Wino Dark Matter and electron/positron Excesses in the PAMELA/Fermi Experiments
• T(13) Flavor Symmetry and Decaying Dark Matter
• Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope: High-Energy Results from the First Year
• Universally Leptophilic Dark Matter From Non-Abelian Discrete Symmetry
• Extended MSSM Neutralinos as the Source of the PAMELA Positron Excess
• Galactic Signatures of Decaying Dark Matter
• Dark matter in the supersymmetric radiative seesaw model with an anomalous U(1) symmetry
• Revisiting Multi-Component Dark Matter with New AMS-02 Data
• Dark Matter in the Singlet Extension of MSSM: Explanation of Pamela and Implication on Higgs Phenomenology
• Probing dark matter models with neutrinos from the Galactic center
• Signals of dark matter in a supersymmetric two dark matter model
• Gamma-rays from Nearby Clusters: Constraints on Selected Decaying Dark Matter Models