Constraints on dark matter annihilation in the Large Magellanic Cloud from multiple low-frequency radio observations

2024/12/04 by Zhanfang Chen, Feng Huang, Chen, Zhanfang +3 · 1 citation
Physics and Astronomy · #Cosmology and Nongalactic Astrophysics (astro-ph.CO) #Dark Matter and Cosmic Phenomena #FOS: Physical sciences #High Energy Astrophysical Phenomena (astro-ph.HE) #High Energy Physics - Phenomenology (hep-ph) #Radio Astronomy Observations and Technology #Scientific Research and Discoveries

paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.2412.03163

openalex publication_date 2024/12/04 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28

Abstract

Low-frequency radio emission from the Large Magellanic Cloud~(LMC) is assumed to be dominated by nonthermal synchrotron radiation from energy loss of energetic e⁺/e^- in magnetic field. Two different kinds of sources of e⁺/e^-, dark matter~(DM) annihilation and cosmic rays~(CR) related to massive stars, are taken into account in this paper. We fit the multiple low-frequency radio observations, from 19.7 MHz to 1.4 GHz, with a double power-law model S_nth =S_DM(\frac νν_⋆)^-α_DM+S_CR( \frac νν_⋆)^-α_CR . ν_⋆ is set to be 1.4 GHz and S_CR could be determined from the 24 μm luminosity based on the global radio-infrared correlation. Our best fit with a fixed α_CR changing from 0.80 to 0.55 yields α_DM ranging from 0.21 to 0.66. Given a fixed value of α_CR, we derive the upper limits of synchrotron emission induced by dark matter annihilation at different radio frequencies. Larger value of α_CR represents for a harder e⁺/e^- spectrum from cosmic rays, which leads to a smaller value of α_DM and allow less synchrotron emission resulted from dark matter annihilation in lower frequency. Under the same assumption on the magnetic field, we find that the lower the frequency, the stronger the restriction on DM parameter space. Meanwhile, as the peak frequency of synchrotron radiation decrease with the energy of e⁺/e^-, constraints on DM properties obtained from lower frequency are more severe in the case of DM with lower mass. Future low-frequency radio survey should be considered a promising and powerful way to constrain DM.

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• Dark matter annihilation signals from the Large Magellanic Cloud and its impact on the Milky Way

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