Can prompt cusps of WIMP dark matter be detected as individual gamma-ray sources?
arXiv:2310.15214 · doi:10.1103/PhysRevD.109.023532
Abstract
Prompt density cusps are the densest and most abundant dark matter systems. If the dark matter is a weakly interacting massive particle (WIMP), recent studies have shown that prompt cusps dominate the aggregate dark matter annihilation rate. This article explores whether individual prompt cusps could be detected as gamma-ray sources. At the Fermi telescope's point-source sensitivity, WIMPs with the canonical annihilation cross section could form detectable prompt cusps if the particle mass is of order 10 GeV. These objects could be 10-100 pc away and weigh under a solar mass; they would subtend around 0.1 degrees on the sky. For GeV-scale dark matter particles with below-canonical cross sections, searches for individual prompt cusps can be more sensitive than searches for the annihilation signals from galactic dark matter halos.
8 pages, 5 figures; accepted by Physical Review D
References in corpus (24)
- Precise Relic WIMP Abundance and its Impact on Searches for Dark Matter Annihilation
- Searching for Dark Matter Annihilation in Recently Discovered Milky Way Satellites with Fermi-LAT
- The First Three Seconds: a Review of Possible Expansion Histories of the Early Universe
- Effects of cold dark matter decoupling and pair annihilation on cosmological perturbations
- Hierarchical Formation of Dark Matter Halos and the Free Streaming Scale
- The Gamma-Ray-Flux Probability Distribution Function from Galactic Halo Substructure
- Proper motion of gamma-rays from microhalo sources
- Inner cusps of the first dark matter haloes: Formation and survival in a cosmological context
- Predicting the density profiles of the first halos
- What sets the central structure of dark matter haloes?
- Fingerprints of the initial conditions on the density profiles of cold and warm dark matter haloes
- Phase-space structure of protohalos: Vlasov versus Particle-Mesh
- Tidal Stripping in the Adiabatic Limit
- Spectral and spatial analysis of the dark matter subhalo candidates among Fermi Large Area Telescope unidentified sources
- Can proper motions of dark-matter subhalos be detected?
- Prompt cusps and the dark matter annihilation signal
- Prompt cusp formation from the gravitational collapse of peaks in the initial cosmological density field
- Investigating the detection of dark matter subhalos as extended sources with Fermi-LAT
- The effect of stellar encounters on the dark matter annihilation signal from prompt cusps
- On the effect of angular momentum on the prompt cusp formation via the gravitational collapse
- Sensitivity of the Cherenkov Telescope Array to dark subhalos
- Massive prompt cusps: A new signature of warm dark matter
- Harnessing the Population Statistics of Subhalos to Search for Annihilating Dark Matter
- A search for dark matter among Fermi-LAT unidentified sources with systematic features in Machine Learning