Abstract
Extensive air shower detectors of gamma rays in the sub-PeV energy region provide a new and relatively unexplored window for dark matter searches. Here we derive some implications of the recently published Tibet AS$_\gamma$ data for decaying dark matter candidates. The available spectral information is already useful in obtaining competitive constraints, surpassing existing limits above 10 PeV mass for hadronic or massive boson final states. This is particularly true if accounting for a benchmark astrophysical background of Galactic cosmic rays in the (0.1-1) PeV range. By relying on the arrival distribution of the photons, we show that significantly better sensitivity can be attained, comparable or better than IceCube also for most leptonic final states. Full data exploitation requires however further information disclosure.
Highlights
The last decade has seen the opening of two windows in astrophysics: the high-energy neutrino one [1,2] and the gravitational wave one [3]
Decaying dark matter (DM) has long been recognized as one of these possibilities [6,7], capable at the same time to account for the peculiar energy and angular distributions of the events [8]
In this article we have presented a first examination of the impact of the recent detection of Galactic gamma rays up to PeV energies by Tibet ASγ [25] for heavy decaying DM models
Summary
The last decade has seen the opening of two windows in astrophysics: the high-energy neutrino one [1,2] and the gravitational wave one [3]. We provide an assessment of the importance of this first detection for DM searches, a task whose relevance has already been recognized in [30] This energy range has its own peculiarities, notably the absence of any extragalactic contribution (since the gamma rays are fully absorbed on the CMB and IR background, cascading down to sub-TeV energies) and the need to take into account partial and anisotropic absorption of the gamma rays even within the Galaxy, as detailed in [11]. For the first time in this context, we include a model of Galactic diffuse gamma rays according to [31] to assess the impact of astrophysical backgrounds on DM searches in this window. Because of the very rudimentary understanding of the cosmic ray sources and propagation properties in this regime, this has to be seen as a motivation for a better assessment of these predictions and of their uncertainties
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