Abstract
The nature of dark matter remains one of the key science questions. Weakly Interacting Massive Particles (WIMPs) are among the best motivated particle physics candidates, allowing to explain the measured dark matter density by employing standard big-bang thermodynamics. Examples include the lightest supersymmetric particle, though many alternative particles have been suggested as a solution to the dark matter puzzle. We introduce here a radically new version of the widely used DarkSUSY package, which allows to compute the properties of such dark matter particles numerically. With DarkSUSY 6 one can accurately predict a large variety of astrophysical signals from dark matter, such as direct detection rates in low-background counting experiments and indirect detection signals through antiprotons, antideuterons, gamma rays and positrons from the Galactic halo, or high-energy neutrinos from the center of the Earth or of the Sun. For thermally produced dark matter like WIMPs, high-precision tools are provided for the computation of the relic density in the Universe today, as well as for the size of the smallest dark matter protohalos. Furthermore, the code allows to calculate dark matter self-interaction rates, which may affect the distribution of dark matter at small cosmological scales. Compared to earlier versions, DarkSUSY 6 introduces many significant physics improvements and extensions. The most fundamental new feature of this release, however, is that the code has been completely re-organized and brought into a highly modular and flexible shape. Switching between different pre-implemented dark matter candidates has thus become straight-forward, just as adding new—WIMP or non-WIMP—particle models or replacing any given functionality in a fully user-specified way. In this article, we describe the physics behind the computer package, along with the main structure and philosophy of this major revision of DarkSUSY. A detailed manual is provided together with the public release at www.darksusy.org.
Highlights
The problem of finding the identity of dark matter (DM), one of the most interesting problems in our picture of the universe, still lacks a solution despite an impressive improvement of detection capabilities
We have presented a fully revised new version 6 of the numerical package DarkSUSY to compute dark matter (DM) properties and observables
DarkSUSY is no longer restricted to supersymmetry and neutralino DM, but allows to handle a large variety of DM candidates from particle physics
Summary
The problem of finding the identity of dark matter (DM), one of the most interesting problems in our picture of the universe, still lacks a solution despite an impressive improvement of detection capabilities. The minimal supersymmetric standard model (MSSM) has served and still serves as a useful template with which to test current ideas about detection, both in particle physics accelerators and in DM experiments, and contains many features which are expected to be universal for any weakly interacting massive particle (WIMP) model. The main new feature of DarkSUSY 6, as compared to earlier DarkSUSY [24] versions, is a radically new modular and flexible structure of the code This allows to handle a wide range of DM particle models, included in the release or supplied by the user, and quite in general makes it much easier to include any user-designed changes or additions. This webpage contains an updated list of contributed particle modules and other extensions of general interest that have been externally developed by users of the code
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