5 research outputs found
Dark Matter Relic Abundance and Scalar-Tensor Dark Energy
Scalar-tensor theories of gravity provide a consistent framework to
accommodate an ultra-light quintessence scalar field. While the equivalence
principle is respected by construction, deviations from General Relativity and
standard cosmology may show up at nucleosynthesis, CMB, and solar system tests
of gravity. After imposing all the bounds coming from these observations, we
consider the expansion rate of the universe at WIMP decoupling, showing that it
can lead to an enhancement of the dark matter relic density up to few orders of
magnitude with respect to the standard case. This effect can have an impact on
supersymmetric candidates for dark matter.Comment: 12 pages, 13 figures; V2: references added, matches published versio
Dark Matter and the CACTUS Gamma-Ray Excess from Draco
The CACTUS atmospheric Cherenkov telescope collaboration recently reported a
gamma-ray excess from the Draco dwarf spheroidal galaxy. Draco features a very
low gas content and a large mass-to-light ratio, suggesting as a possible
explanation annihilation of weakly interacting massive particles (WIMPs) in the
Draco dark-matter halo. We show that with improved angular resolution, future
measurements can determine whether the halo is cored or cuspy, as well as its
scale radius. We find the relevant WIMP masses and annihilation cross sections
and show that supersymmetric models can account for the required gamma-ray
flux. The annihilation cross section range is found to be not compatible with a
standard thermal relic dark-matter production. We compute for these
supersymmetric models the resulting Draco gamma-ray flux in the GLAST energy
range and the rates for direct neutralino detection and for the flux of
neutrinos from neutralino annihilation in the Sun. We also discuss the
possibility that the bulk of the signal detected by CACTUS comes from direct
WIMP annihilation to two photons and point out that a decaying-dark-matter
scenario for Draco is not compatible with the gamma-ray flux from the Galactic
center and in the diffuse gamma-ray background.Comment: 24 pages, 10 figures; version accepted for publication in JCA
The Role of Antimatter Searches in the Hunt for Supersymmetric Dark Matter
We analyze the antimatter yield of supersymmetric (SUSY) models with large
neutralino annihilation cross sections. We introduce three benchmark scenarios,
respectively featuring bino, wino and higgsino-like lightest neutralinos, and
we study in detail the resulting antimatter spectral features. We carry out a
systematic and transparent comparison between current and future prospects for
direct detection, neutrino telescopes and antimatter searches. We demonstrate
that often, in the models we consider, antimatter searches are the only
detection channel which already constrains the SUSY parameter space.
Particularly large antiprotons fluxes are expected for wino-like lightest
neutralinos, while significant antideuteron fluxes result from resonantly
annihilating binos. We introduce a simple and general recipe which allows to
assess the visibility of a given SUSY model at future antimatter search
facilities. We provide evidence that upcoming space-based experiments, like
PAMELA or AMS, are going to be, in many cases, the unique open road towards
dark matter discovery.Comment: 34 pages, 18 figures; V2: misprints in the labels of fig. 2,3 and 5
correcte
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