Galactic antiproton spectrum at high energies: Background expectation versus exotic contributions

2006/12/31 by Torsten Bringmann, Pierre Salati · 9 citations
Physics and Astronomy · #Cosmology and Gravitation Theories #Dark Matter and Cosmic Phenomena #Particle physics theoretical and experimental studies #astro-ph #hep-ph

paper · pdf · doi:10.1103/physrevd.75.083006

published as Phys.Rev.D75:083006,2007 · 17 pages revtex4, 7 figures; minor changes (to match the published version)

openalex publication_date 2007/04/27 · arxiv created 2007/05/02 · arxiv updated 2009/12/01 · openalex created_date 2016/06/24 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28

Abstract

A new generation of upcoming space-based experiments will soon start to probe the spectrum of cosmic-ray antiparticles with an unprecedented accuracy and, in particular, will open up a window to energies much higher than those accessible so far. It is thus timely to carefully investigate the expected antiparticle fluxes at high energies. Here, we perform such an analysis for the case of antiprotons. We consider both standard sources as the collision of other cosmic rays with interstellar matter, as well as exotic contributions from dark matter annihilations in the galactic halo. Up to energies well above 100 GeV, we find that the background flux in antiprotons is almost uniquely determined by the existing low-energy data on various cosmic-ray species; for even higher energies, however, the uncertainties in the parameters of the underlying propagation model eventually become significant. We also show that if the dark matter is composed of particles with masses at the TeV scale, which is naturally expected in extra-dimensional models as well as in certain parameter regions of supersymmetric models, the annihilation flux can become comparable to---or even dominate---the antiproton background at the high energies considered here.

Citations

• Cosmic Antiprotons as a Probe for Supersymmetric Dark Matter?
• TeVγ-rays and the largest masses and annihilation cross sections of neutralino dark matter
• Neutralino annihilation intoγrays in the Milky Way and in external galaxies
• New signature of dark matter annihilations: Gamma rays from intermediate-mass black holes
• Relic abundance of dark matter in the minimal universal extra dimension model

Cited by

• Dipole-interacting fermionic dark matter in positron, antiproton, and gamma-ray channels
• On the effective operators for Dark Matter annihilations
• Deducing the nature of dark matter from direct and indirect detection experiments in the absence of collider signatures of new physics
• Minimal Dark Matter predictions for galactic positrons, anti-protons, photons
• Antiproton limits on decaying gravitino dark matter
• Prospects of antideuteron detection from dark matter annihilations or decays at AMS-02 and GAPS
• Cosmic ray electron and positron excesses from a fourth generation heavy Majorana neutrino
• e+and p from inert doublet model dark matter
• Full calculation of clumpiness boost factors for antimatter cosmic rays in the light of ΛCDM N-body simulation results