2 research outputs found
Low energy antideuterons: shedding light on dark matter
Low energy antideuterons suffer a very low secondary and tertiary
astrophysical background, while they can be abundantly synthesized in dark
matter pair annihilations, therefore providing a privileged indirect dark
matter detection technique. The recent publication of the first upper limit on
the low energy antideuteron flux by the BESS collaboration, a new evaluation of
the standard astrophysical background, and remarkable progresses in the
development of a dedicated experiment, GAPS, motivate a new and accurate
analysis of the antideuteron flux expected in particle dark matter models. To
this extent, we consider here supersymmetric, universal extra-dimensions (UED)
Kaluza-Klein and warped extra-dimensional dark matter models, and assess both
the prospects for antideuteron detection as well as the various related sources
of uncertainties. The GAPS experiment, even in a preliminary balloon-borne
setup, will explore many supersymmetric configurations, and, eventually, in its
final space-borne configuration, will be sensitive to primary antideuterons
over the whole cosmologically allowed UED parameter space, providing a search
technique which is highly complementary with other direct and indirect dark
matter detection experiments.Comment: 26 pages, 7 figures; version to appear in JCA
Updated status of the global electroweak fit and constraints on new physics
We present an update of the Standard Model fit to electroweak precision data.
We include newest experimental results on the top quark mass, the W mass and
width, and the Higgs boson mass bounds from LEP, Tevatron and the LHC. We also
include a new determination of the electromagnetic coupling strength at the Z
pole. We find for the Higgs boson mass (91 +30 -23) GeV and (120 +12 -5) GeV
when not including and including the direct Higgs searches, respectively. From
the latter fit we indirectly determine the W mass to be (80.360 +0.014 -0.013)
GeV. We exploit the data to determine experimental constraints on the oblique
vacuum polarisation parameters, and confront these with predictions from the
Standard Model (SM) and selected SM extensions. By fitting the oblique
parameters to the electroweak data we derive allowed regions in the BSM
parameter spaces. We revisit and consistently update these constraints for a
fourth fourth fermion generation, two Higgs doublet, inert Higgs and littlest
Higgs models, models with large, universal or warped extra dimensions and
technicolour. In most of the models studied a heavy Higgs boson can be made
compatible with the electroweak precision data.Comment: 58 pages, 27 figures, published versio