Prospects of antideuteron detection from dark matter annihilations or decays at AMS-02 and GAPS

Abstract

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.

19 pages, 7 figures. Matches published version

References in corpus (7)

• PYTHIA 6.4 Physics and Manual
• Study of the inclusive production of charged pions, kaons, and protons in pp collisions at sqrt(s) = 0.9, 2.76, and 7 TeV
• The galactic antiproton spectrum at high energies: background expectation vs. exotic contributions
• Antideuteron fluxes from dark matter annihilation in diffusion models
• Deuteron and Anti-deuteron Production in e+e- Collisions at the Z Resonance
• General Analysis of Antideuteron Searches for Dark Matter
• Antideuterons from dark matter annihilations and hadronization model dependence

Cited by in corpus (38)

• Loosely-bound objects produced in nuclear collisions at the LHC
• Form factors for dark matter capture by the Sun in effective theories
• Review of the theoretical and experimental status of dark matter identification with cosmic-ray antideuterons
• Prospects to verify a possible dark matter hint in cosmic antiprotons with antideuterons and antihelium
• Signatures of Majorana dark matter with t-channel mediators
• Cosmic rays, anti-helium, and an old navy spotlight
• Antihelium from Dark Matter
• The nature of $X(3872)$ from high-multiplicity $pp$ collisions
• Cosmic-ray Antinuclei as Messengers of New Physics: Status and Outlook for the New Decade
• Dark matter searches with cosmic antideuterons: status and perspectives
• Anti-helium from Dark Matter annihilations
• Determination of the Cosmic Antideuteron Flux in a Monte Carlo approach
• Origin of the tentative AMS antihelium events
• Alternative coalescence model for deuteron, tritium, helium-3 and their antinuclei
• Antideuteron Limits on Decaying Dark Matter with a Tuned Formation Model
• Measurement of the low-energy antideuteron inelastic cross section
• The flight of the GAPS prototype experiment
• Revisiting cosmic ray antinuclei fluxes with a new coalescence model
• Cosmic antihelium-3 nuclei sensitivity of the GAPS experiment
• Deuteron and Antideuteron Production Simulation in Cosmic-ray Interactions
• An Alternative Formation Model for Antideuterons from Dark Matter
• Reevaluation of the cosmic antideuteron flux from cosmic-ray interactions and from exotic sources
• Large-scale Simulations of Antihelium Production in Cosmic-ray Interactions
• Prospects of detecting dark matter through cosmic-ray antihelium with the antiproton constraints
• On nuclear coalescence in small interacting systems
• Antideuterons from Decaying Gravitino Dark Matter
• Axino LSP Baryogenesis and Dark Matter
• Late-forming black holes and the antiproton, gamma-ray, and anti-helium excesses
• Gravitino Dark Matter and Flavor Symmetries
• Searching for Dark Photon Dark Matter with Cosmic Ray Antideuterons
• Constraining the Higgs portal with antiprotons
• Perspectives of dark matter searches with antideuterons
• Production of loosely-bound hadron molecules from bottomonium decays
• $\overline{\text{D}}$arkRayNet: Emulation of cosmic-ray antideuteron fluxes from dark matter
• Status of cosmic-ray antideuteron searches
• Astro 2020 Science White Paper: Cosmic-ray Antinuclei as Messengers for Dark Matter
• Formation of light (anti)nuclei
• Toward universal coalescence models for antideuteron production