Abstract
Cosmic-ray (CR) anti-nuclei are often considered important observables for indirect dark matter (DM) detection at low kinetic energies, below GeV per nucleon. Since the primary CR fluxes drop quickly towards high energies, the secondary anti-nuclei in CR are expected to be significantly suppressed in high energy regions (gtrsim 100 GeV per nucleon). If DM particles are heavy, the annihilation productions of DM can be highly boosted, and thus the fluxes of anti-nuclei produced by DM annihilation may exceed the secondary background at high energies, which opens a high energy window for indirect DM detection. We investigate the possibility of detecting heavy DM particles which annihilate into high energy anti-nuclei. We use the Monte Carlo generators PYTHIA, EPOS-LHC and DPMJET and the coalescence model to simulate the production of anti-nuclei, and constrain the DM annihilation cross-sections by using the AMS-02 and HAWC antiproton data and the HESS galactic center gamma -ray data. We find that the conclusion depends on the choice of DM density profiles. For the “Cored” type profile with a DM particle mass gtrsim 10 TeV, the contributions from DM annihilation can exceed the secondary background in high energy regions, which opens the high energy window, while for the “Cuspy” type profile, the excess disappears.
Highlights
The existence of dark matter (DM) is supported by various astronomic observations at different scales, but the particle nature of DM is still mysterious
This comparison shows that EPOS-LHC has the best performance, DPMJET-III are in relatively good agreements with the experiment, while the production cross section of pgiven by PYTHIA 8.2 are larger than the NA49 data roughly by a factor of two
We explored the possibility of probing DM by high energy cosmic rays (CR) anti-nuclei
Summary
The existence of dark matter (DM) is supported by various astronomic observations at different scales, but the particle nature of DM is still mysterious. The fluxes of anti-nuclei decrease rapidly with the increase of the atom mass number A, the high signal-to-background ratio at low energies and the experiments with high sensitivities (such as AMS-02 [19, 20] and GAPS [21]) make it possible to distinguish the contributions originated from DM interactions. We systematically analysed the uncertainties from propagation models, DM density profiles and MC generators, and reduced the uncertainties by constraining the DM annihilation cross sections with the AMS-02 p/p data. The fluxes of anti-nuclei produced by DM annihilations may exceed the secondary background and open a high energy window for probing the DM.
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