A novel way of constraining WIMPs annihilations in the Sun: MeV neutrinos

Annihilation of dark matter particles accumulated in the Sun would produce a flux of high-energy neutrinos whose prospects of detection in neutrino telescopes and detectors have been extensively discussed in the literature. However, for annihilations into Standard Model particles, there would also be a flux of neutrinos in the MeV range from the decays at rest of muons and positively charged pions. These low-energy neutrinos have never been considered before and they open the possibility to also constrain dark matter annihilation in the Sun into e+e-, mu+mu- or light quarks. Here we perform a detailed analysis using the recent Super-Kamiokande data in the few tens of MeV range to set limits on the WIMP-nucleon scattering cross section for different annihilation channels and computing the evaporation rate of WIMPs from the Sun for all values of the scattering cross section in a consistent way.

The MSSM with heavy scalars

We perform a comprehensive analysis of the Minimal Supersymmetric Standard Model (MSSM) in the scenario where the scalar partners of the fermions and the Higgs particles (except for the Standard-Model-like one) are assumed to be very heavy and are removed from the low-energy spectrum. We first summarize our determination of the mass spectrum, in which we include the one-loop radiative corrections and resum to all orders the leading logarithms of the large scalar masses, and describe the implementation of these features in the FORTRAN code SuSpect which calculates the masses and couplings of the MSSM particles. We then study in detail the phenomenology of the model in scenarios where the gaugino mass parameters are non-universal at the GUT scale, which leads to very interesting features that are not present in the widely studied case of universal gaugino mass parameters. We discuss the constraints from collider searches and high-precision measurements, the cosmological constraints on the relic abundance of the neutralino candidate for the Dark Matter in the Universe - where new and interesting channels for neutralino annihilation appear - and the gluino lifetime. We then analyze, in the case of non-universal gaugino masses, the decays of the Higgs boson (in particular decays into and contributions of SUSY particles), of charginos and neutralinos (in particular decays into Higgs bosons and photons) and of gluinos, and highlight the differences from the case of universal gaugino masses.

Constraining the Milky Way Dark Matter Density Profile with Gamma-Rays with Fermi-LAT

We study the abilities of the Fermi-LAT instrument on board of the Fermi mission to simultaneously constrain the Milky Way dark matter density profile and some dark matter particle properties, as annihilation cross section, mass and branching ratio into dominant annihilation channels. A single dark matter density profile is commonly assumed to determine the capabilities of gamma-ray experiments to extract dark matter properties or to set limits on them. However, our knowledge of the Milky Way halo is far from perfect, and thus in general, the obtained results are too optimistic. Here, we study the effect these astrophysical uncertainties would have on the determination of dark matter particle properties and conversely, we show how gamma-ray searches could also be used to learn about the structure of the Milky Way halo, as a complementary tool to other type of observational data that study the gravitational effect caused by the presence of dark matter. In addition, we also show how these results would improve if external information on the annihilation cross section and on the local dark matter density were included and compare our results with the predictions from numerical simulations.