Unstable Gravitino Dark Matter - Prospects for Indirect and Direct Detection

Abstract

We confront the signals expected from unstable gravitino dark matter with observations of indirect dark matter detection experiments in all possible cosmic-ray channels. For this purpose we calculate in detail the gravitino decay widths in theories with bilinear violation of R parity, particularly focusing on decay channels with three particles in the final state. Based on these calculations we predict the fluxes of gamma rays, charged cosmic rays and neutrinos expected from decays of gravitino dark matter. Although the predicted spectra could in principal explain the anomalies observed in the cosmic-ray positron and electron fluxes as measured by PAMELA and Fermi LAT, we find that this possibility is ruled out by strong constraints from gamma-ray and antiproton observations. Therefore, we employ current data of indirect detection experiments to place strong constraints on the gravitino lifetime and the strength of R-parity violation. In addition, we discuss the prospects of forthcoming searches for a gravitino signal in the spectrum of cosmic-ray antideuterons, finding that they are in particular sensitive to rather low gravitino masses. Finally, we discuss in detail the prospects for detecting a neutrino signal from gravitino dark matter decays, finding that the sensitivity of neutrino telescopes like IceCube is competitive to observations in other cosmic ray channels, especially for rather heavy gravitinos. Moreover, we discuss the prospects for a direct detection of gravitino dark matter via R-parity violating inelastic scatterings off nucleons. We find that, although the scattering cross section is considerably enhanced compared to the case of elastic gravitino scattering, the expected signal is many orders of magnitude too small in order to hope for a detection in underground detectors.

Doctoral thesis, Universität Hamburg, defended on 6 July 2011; 220 pages, 59 figures; correction of several typos

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