Anti-helium from Dark Matter annihilations

Abstract

Galactic Dark Matter (DM) annihilations can produce cosmic-ray anti-nuclei via the nuclear coalescence of the anti-protons and anti-neutrons originated directly from the annihilation process. Since anti-deuterons have been shown to offer a distinctive DM signal, with potentially good prospects of detection in large portions of the DM-particle parameter space, we explore here the production of heavier anti-nuclei, specifically anti-helium. Even more than for anti-deuterons, the DM-produced anti-He flux can be mostly prominent over the astrophysical anti-He background at low kinetic energies, typically below 3-5 GeV/n. However, the larger number of anti-nucleons involved in the formation process makes the anti-He flux extremely small. We therefore explore, for a few DM benchmark cases, whether the yield is sufficient to allow for anti-He detection in current-generation experiments, such as AMS-02. We account for the uncertainties due to the propagation in the Galaxy and to the uncertain details of the coalescence process, and we consider the constraints already imposed by anti-proton searches. We find that only for very optimistic configurations it might be possible to achieve detection with current generation detectors. We estimate that, in more realistic configurations, an increase in experimental sensitivity at low-kinetic energies of about a factor of 500-1000 would allow to start probing DM through the rare cosmic anti-He production.

13 pages, 5 figures. In v2 an appendix is added with the computation of the astrophysical anti-helium background (several other small clarifications are added). v2 matches version published on JHEP. In v3 we correct a bug in the computation of the astrophysical anti-helium background and take the occasion to add some discussion and comments. The main results are not affected

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