Searching for Dark Photon Dark Matter with Cosmic Ray Antideuterons

Abstract

Low energy antideuteron detection presents a unique channel for indirect detection, targeting dark matter that annihilates into hadrons in a relatively background-free way. Since the idea was first proposed, many WIMP-type models have already been disfavored by direct detection experiments, and current constraints indicate that any thermal relic candidates likely annihilate through some hidden sector process. In this paper, we show that cosmic ray antideuteron detection experiments represent one of the best ways to search for hidden sector thermal relic dark matter, and in particular investigate a vector portal dark matter that annihilates via a massive dark photon. We find that the parameter space with thermal relic annihilation and $m_{\chi }>m_{A^{\prime }}\gtrsim 20\mathrm{GeV}$ is largely unconstrained, and near future antideuteron experiment \GAPS will be able to probe models in this space with $m_{\chi }\approx m_{A^{\prime }}$ up to masses of $O(100\mathrm{GeV})$. Specifically the dark matter models favored by the \textit{Fermi} Galactic center excess is expected to be detected or constrained at the $5(3)-\sigma$ level assuming a optimistic (conservative) propagation model.

22 pages, 21 figures. Matches version accepted by JHEP

References in corpus (12)

• Dark Matter Candidates from Particle Physics and Methods of Detection
• Search for $A^{\prime }\to {\mu }^{+}{\mu }^{-}$ decays
• Kinetic Mixing as the Origin of Light Dark Scales
• Fitting the Galactic Center Gamma-Ray Excess with Cascade Annihilations
• Cosmic-ray transport from AMS-02 B/C data: benchmark models and interpretation
• Dark matter from dark photons: a taxonomy of dark matter production
• p, He, and C to Fe cosmic-ray primary fluxes in diffusion models: Source and transport signatures on fluxes and ratios
• Secondary Cosmic Ray Nuclei from Supernova Remnants and Constraints to the Propagation Parameters
• General Analysis of Antideuteron Searches for Dark Matter
• Antideuterons in cosmic rays: sources and discovery potential
• Chiral Dark Sector
• Ultralight dark photon as a model for early universe dark matter

Cited by in corpus (2)

• Cosmic-ray Antinuclei as Messengers of New Physics: Status and Outlook for the New Decade
• CMB $V$ modes from photon-photon forward scattering revisited