Prospects of antideuteron detection from dark matter annihilations or decays at AMS-02 and GAPS

2012/09/30 by Alejandro Ibarra, Sebastian Wild · 4 citations
Physics and Astronomy · #Annihilation #Antiproton #Astronomy #Astrophysics #Coalescence (physics) #Cosmic ray #Cosmology and Gravitation Theories #Dark Matter and Cosmic Phenomena #Dark matter #Flux (metallurgy) #Nuclear physics #Particle physics #Particle physics theoretical and experimental studies #Physics #Proton #astro-ph.CO #hep-ph

paper · pdf · doi:10.1088/1475-7516/2013/02/021

published as JCAP1302(2013)021 · 19 pages, 7 figures. Matches published version

openalex publication_date 2013/02/13 · arxiv created 2013/05/10 · arxiv updated 2015/06/11 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/08/05

Abstract

The search for cosmic antideuterons has been proposed as a promising method to indirectly detect dark matter, due to the very small background flux from spallations expected at the energies relevant to experiments. The antideuteron flux from dark matter annihilations or decays is, however, severely constrained by the non-observation of an excess in the antiproton-to-proton fraction measured by PAMELA. In this paper we calculate, for representative dark matter annihilation and decay channels, upper limits on the number of antideuteron events at AMS-02 and GAPS from requiring that the associated antiproton flux is in agreement with the PAMELA data. To this end, we first analyze in detail the formation of antideuterons in the coalescence model using an event-by-event Monte Carlo simulation and using data from various high energy experiments. We find that the resulting coalescence momentum shows a dependence on the underlying process and on the center of mass energy involved. Then, we calculate, using a diffusion model, the flux of antideuterons at the Earth from dark matter annihilations or decays. Our results indicate that, despite the various sources of uncertainty, the observation of an antideuteron flux at AMS-02 or GAPS from dark matter annihilations or decays will be challenging.

Citations

• Galactic antiproton spectrum at high energies: Background expectation versus exotic contributions
• Low energy antideuterons: shedding light on dark matter
• The production of anti-matter in our galaxy
• Antideuteron fluxes from dark matter annihilation in diffusion models
• Deuteron and anti-deuteron production in e+e− collisions at the Z resonance
• Antideuterons as a signature of supersymmetric dark matter
• The Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer (AMS) on the International Space Station: Part I – results from the test flight on the space shuttle

Cited by

• Inelastic Antideutron Interaction with Nuclei
• Review of the theoretical and experimental status of dark matter identification with cosmic-ray antideuterons
• Dark matter searches with cosmic antideuterons: status and perspectives
• Deuteron and antideuteron production simulation in cosmic-ray interactions

Related

• Antideuteron fluxes from dark matter annihilation in diffusion models
• Expectations of the Cosmic Antideuteron Flux
• Atmospheric Antideuteron Flux Within a Dynamical Coalescence Approach
• The General Antiparticle Spectrometer (GAPS) - Hunt for dark matter using low-energy antideuterons
• Antideuterons from supersymmetric dark matter