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Register a new userGAPS - Dark matter search with low-energy cosmic-ray antideuterons and antiprotons
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Added by
Philip von Doetinchem
Publication date
2015
fields
Physics
and research's language is
English
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The GAPS experiment is foreseen to carry out a dark matter search by measuring low-energy cosmic-ray antideuterons and antiprotons with a novel detection approach. It will provide a new avenue to access a wide range of different dark matter models and masses from about 10GeV to 1TeV. The theoretically predicted antideuteron flux resulting from secondary interactions of primary cosmic rays is very low. Well-motivated theories beyond the Standard Model contain viable dark matter candidates, which could lead to a significant enhancement of the antideuteron flux due to annihilation or decay of dark matter particles. This flux contribution is believed to be especially large at low energies, which leads to a high discovery potential for GAPS. The GAPS low-energy antiproton search will provide some of the most stringent constraints on ~30GeV dark matter, will provide the best limits on primordial black hole evaporation on galactic length scales, and explore new discovery space in cosmic-ray physics. GAPS is designed to achieve its goals via long duration balloon flights at high altitude in Antarctica. The detector itself will consist of 10 planes of Si(Li) solid state detectors and a surrounding time-of-flight system. Antideuterons and antiprotons will be slowed down in the Si(Li) material, replace a shell electron and form an excited exotic atom. The atom will be deexcited by characteristic X-ray transitions and will end its life by the formation of an annihilation pion/proton star. This unique event structure will deliver a nearly background free detection possibility.
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The GAPS experiment is designed to carry out a sensitive dark matter search by measuring low-energy cosmic ray antideuterons and antiprotons. GAPS will provide a new avenue to access a wide range of dark matter models and masses that is complementary to direct detection techniques, collider experiments and other indirect detection techniques. Well-motivated theories beyond the Standard Model contain viable dark matter candidates which could lead to a detectable signal of antideuterons resulting from the annihilation or decay of dark matter particles. The dark matter contribution to the antideuteron flux is believed to be especially large at low energies (E < 1 GeV), where the predicted flux from conventional astrophysical sources (i.e. from secondary interactions of cosmic rays) is very low. The GAPS low-energy antiproton search will provide stringent constraints on less than 10 GeV dark matter, will provide the best limits on primordial black hole evaporation on Galactic length scales, and will explore new discovery space in cosmic ray physics. Unlike other antimatter search experiments such as BESS and AMS that use magnetic spectrometers, GAPS detects antideuterons and antiprotons using an exotic atom technique. This technique, and its unique event topology, will give GAPS a nearly background-free detection capability that is critical in a rare-event search. GAPS is designed to carry out its science program using long-duration balloon flights in Antarctica. A prototype instrument was successfully flown from Taiki, Japan in 2012. GAPS has now been approved by NASA to proceed towards the full science instrument, with the possibility of a first long-duration balloon flight in late 2020. Here we motivate low-energy cosmic ray antimatter searches and discuss the current status of the GAPS experiment and the design of the payload.
Low energy antideuteron detection presents a unique channel for indirect detection, targeting dark matter that annihilates into hadrons in a relatively background-free way. Since the idea was first proposed, many WIMP-type models have already been disfavored by direct detection experiments, and current constraints indicate that any thermal relic candidates likely annihilate through some hidden sector process. In this paper, we show that cosmic ray antideuteron detection experiments represent one of the best ways to search for hidden sector thermal relic dark matter, and in particular investigate a vector portal dark matter that annihilates via a massive dark photon. We find that the parameter space with thermal relic annihilation and $m_chi > m_{A} gtrsim 20 , mathrm{GeV}$ is largely unconstrained, and near future antideuteron experiment GAPS will be able to probe models in this space with $m_chi approx m_{A}$ up to masses of $O(100,mathrm{GeV})$. Specifically the dark matter models favored by the textit{Fermi} Galactic center excess is expected to be detected or constrained at the $5(3)-sigma$ level assuming a optimistic (conservative) propagation model.
The GAPS experiment is foreseen to carry out a dark matter search using a novel detection approach to detect low-energy cosmic-ray antideuterons. The theoretically predicted antideuteron flux resulting from secondary interactions of primary cosmic rays with the interstellar medium is very low. So far not a single cosmic antideuteron has been detected by any experiment, but well-motivated theories beyond the standard model of particle physics, e.g., supersymmetry or universal extra dimensions, contain viable dark matter candidates, which could led to a significant enhancement of the antideuteron flux due to self-annihilation of the dark matter particles.This flux contribution is believed to be especially large at small energies, which leads to a high discovery potential for GAPS. GAPS is designed to achieve its goals via a series of ultra-long duration balloon flights at high altitude in Antarctica, starting in 2014. The detector itself will consist of 13 planes of Si(Li) solid state detectors and a time of flight system. The low-energy antideuterons (< 0.3 GeV/n) will be slowed down in the Si(Li) material, replace a shell electron, and form an excited exotic atom. The atom will be deexcited by characteristic x-ray transitions and will end its life by forming an annihilation pion star. This unique event structure will allow for nearly background free detection. To prove the performance of the different detector components at stratospheric altitudes, a prototype flight will be conducted in 2011 from Taiki, Japan.
The general antiparticle spectrometer (GAPS) experiment is a proposed indirect dark matter search focusing on antiparticles produced by WIMP (weakly interacting massive particle) annihilation and decay in the Galactic halo. In addition to the very powerful search channel provided by antideuterons, GAPS has a strong capability to measure low-energy antiprotons (0.07 $le$ E $le$ 0.25 GeV) as dark matter signatures. This is an especially effective means for probing light dark matter, whose existence has been hinted at in the direct dark matter searches, including the recent result from the CDMS-II experiment. While severely constrained by LUX and other direct dark matter searches, light dark matter candidates are still viable in an isospin-violating dark matter scenario and halo-independent analysis. Along with the excellent antideuteron sensitivity, GAPS will be able to detect an order of magnitude more low-energy antiprotons, compared to BESS, PAMELA and AMS-02, providing a precision measurement of low-energy antiproton flux and a unique channel for probing light dark matter models. Additionally, dark matter signatures from gravitinos and Kaluza-Klein right-handed neutrinos as well as evidence of primordial black hole evaporation can be observed through low-energy antiproton search.
The interpretation of data from indirect detection experiments searching for dark matter annihilations requires computationally expensive simulations of cosmic-ray propagation. In this work we present a new method based on Recurrent Neural Networks that significantly accelerates simulations of secondary and dark matter Galactic cosmic ray antiprotons while achieving excellent accuracy. This approach allows for an efficient profiling or marginalisation over the nuisance parameters of a cosmic ray propagation model in order to perform parameter scans for a wide range of dark matter models. We identify importance sampling as particularly suitable for ensuring that the network is only evaluated in well-trained parameter regions. We present resulting constraints using the most recent AMS-02 antiproton data on several models of Weakly Interacting Massive Particles. The fully trained networks are released as DarkRayNet together with this work and achieve a speed-up of the runtime by at least two orders of magnitude compared to conventional approaches.
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