2022/05/14 by Miener, Tjark, Nieto, Daniel, Gammaldi, Viviana +2
#Cosmology and Nongalactic Astrophysics (astro-ph.CO) #FOS: Physical sciences #High Energy Astrophysical Phenomena (astro-ph.HE)
paper · doi:10.48550/arxiv.2205.07055
We present the first branon dark matter (DM) search in the very high-energy gamma-ray band with observations of the dwarf spheroidal galaxy Segue~1 carried out by the Major Atmospheric Gamma Imaging Cherenkov (MAGIC) telescope system. Branons are new degrees of freedom that appear in flexible brane-world models corresponding to brane fluctuations. They behave as weakly interacting massive particles, which are natural DM candidates. In the absence of a gamma-ray signal in the Segue~1 data, we place constraints on the branon DM parameter space by using a binned likelihood analysis. Our most constraining limit to the thermally-averaged annihilation cross-section (at 95% confidence level) corresponds to ⟨ σv ⟩ ≃ 1.4 × 10-23~cm3s-1 at a branon DM mass of ∼ 0.7~TeV.