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Register a new userIndirect dark matter search with AMS-02
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S. Di Falco
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The Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer (AMS), to be installed on the International Space Station, will provide data on cosmic radiations in the energy range from 0.5 GeV to 3 TeV. The main physics goals are the anti-matter and the dark matter searches. Observations and cosmology indicate that the Universe may include a large amount of unknown Dark Matter. It should be composed of non baryonic Weakly Interacting Massive Particles (WIMP). In R-parity conserving models a good WIMP candidate is the lightest SUSY particle. AMS offers a unique opportunity to study simultaneously SUSY dark matter in three decay channels resulting from the neutralino annihilation: e+, antiproton and gamma. Either in the SUSY frame and in alternative scenarios (like extra-dimensions) the expected flux sensitivities as a function of energy in 3 year exposure for the e+/e- ratio, gamma and antiproton yields are presented.
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We consider indirect detection of meta-stable dark matter particles decaying into a stable neutral particle and a pair of standard model fermions. Due to the softer energy spectra from the three-body decay, such models could potentially explain the AMS-02 positron excess without being constrained by the Fermi-LAT gamma-ray data and the cosmic ray anti-proton measurements. We scrutinize over different final state fermions, paying special attention to handling of the cosmic ray background and including various contributions from cosmic ray propagation with the help of the textsc{LikeDM} package. It is found that primary decays into an electron-positron pair and a stable neutral particle could give rise to the AMS-02 positron excess and, at the same time, stay unscathed against the gamma-ray and anti-proton constraints. Decays to a muon pair or a mixed flavor electron-muon pair may also be viable depending on the propagation models. Decays to all other standard model fermions are severely disfavored.
The Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer (AMS), whose final version AMS-02 is to be installed on the International Space Station (ISS) for at least 3 years, is a detector designed to measure charged cosmic ray spectra with energies up to the TeV region and with high energy photon detection capability up to a few hundred GeV, using state-of-the art particle identification techniques. It is equipped with several subsystems, one of which is a proximity focusing Ring Imaging Cherenkov (RICH) detector equipped with a dual radiator (aerogel+NaF), a lateral conical mirror and a detection plane made of 680 photomultipliers and light guides, enabling precise measurements of particle electric charge and velocity (Delta beta / beta ~ 10^-3 and 10^-4 for Z=1 and Z=10-20, respectively) at kinetic energies of a few GeV/nucleon. Combining velocity measurements with data on particle rigidity from the AMS-02 Tracker (Delta R / R ~ 2% for R=1-10 GV) it is possible to obtain a reliable measurement for particle mass. One of the main topics of the AMS-02 physics program is the search for indirect signatures of dark matter. Experimental data indicate that dark, non-baryonic matter of unknown composition is much more abundant than baryonic matter, accounting for a large fraction of the energy content of the Universe. Apart from antideuterons produced in cosmic-ray propagation, the annihilation of dark matter will produce additional antideuteron fluxes. Detailed Monte Carlo simulations of AMS-02 have been used to evaluate the detectors performance for mass separation, a key issue for anti-D/anti-p separation. Results of these studies are presented.
For explaining the AMS-02 cosmic positron excess, which was recently reported, we consider a scenario of thermally produced and decaying dark matter (DM) into the standard model (SM) leptons with an extremely small decay rate, Gamma_{DM} sim 10^{-26} sec.^{-1}. Since the needed DM mass is relatively heavy (700 GeV < m_{DM} < 3000 GeV), we introduce another DM component apart from the lightest supersymmetric particle (LSP). For its (meta-) stability and annihilation into other particles, the new DM should be accompanied with another Z_2 symmetry apart from the R-parity. Sizable renormalizable couplings of the new DM with SM particles, which are necessary for its thermalization in the early universe, cannot destabilize the new DM because of the new Z_2 symmetry. Since the new DM was thermally produced, it can naturally explain the present energy density of the universe. The new DM can decay into the SM leptons (and the LSP) only through non-renormalizable operators suppressed by a superheavy squared mass parameter after the new symmetry is broken around TeV scale. We realize this scenario in a model of gauged vector-like leptons, which was proposed recently for the naturalness of the Higgs boson.
The AMS-02 collaboration has recently released data on the positron fraction $e^+/(e^-+e^+)$ up to energies of about 350 GeV. If one insists on interpreting the observed excess as a dark matter signal, then we find it is best described by a TeV-scale dark matter annihilating into $tau^+tau^-$, although this situation is already severely constrained by gamma-ray measurements. The annihilation into $mu^+mu^-$ is allowed by gamma-rays more than $tau^+tau^-$, but it gives a poorer fit to textsc{AMS-02} data. Moreover, since electroweak corrections induce correlations among the fluxes of stable particles from dark matter annihilations, the recent AMS-02 data imply a well-defined prediction for the correlated flux of antiprotons. Under the assumption that their future measurements will not show any antiproton excess above the background, the dark matter interpretation of the positron rise will possibly be ruled out by only making use of data from a single experiment. This work is the first of a program where we emphasize the role of correlations among dark matter signals.
We present a new module of micrOMEGAs devoted to the computation of indirect signals from dark matter annihilation in any new model with a stable weakly interacting particle. The code provides the mass spectrum, cross-sections, relic density and exotic fluxes of gamma rays, positrons and antiprotons. The propagation of charged particles in the Galactic halo is handled with a new module that allows to easily modify the propagation parameters.
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