Dark Matter: experimental results and theory

Abstract

Indirect searches for Dark Matter (DM) aim at detecting the signatures of the annihilations or decays of DM particles in the fluxes of Cosmic Rays (CRs), intended in a broad sense: charged particles (electrons and positrons, protons and antiprotons, deuterium and antideuterium), photons (gamma rays, X-rays, synchrotron radiation), neutrinos. In general, a key point of all these searches is to look for channels and ranges of energy where it is possible to beat the background from ordinary astrophysical processes. This is for instance the basic reason why searches for charged particles focus on fluxes of antiparticles (positrons, antiprotons, antideuterons), much less abundant in the Universe than the corresponding particles, and searches for photons or neutrinos have to look at areas where the DM-signal to astro-noise ratio can be maximized (typically the Galactic Center and DM-dominated structures such as dwarf satellite galaxies).