2019/06/30 by Aion Viana, Harm Schoorlemmer, Andrea Albert +3 · 1 citation
Physics and Astronomy · #astro-ph.HE #hep-ex #hep-ph
paper · pdf · doi:10.1088/1475-7516/2019/12/061
Accepted for publication in JCAP, 15 pages (+ references), 14 figures
arxiv created 2019/12/21 · arxiv updated 2019/12/24
Despite mounting evidence that dark matter (DM) exists in the Universe, its fundamental nature remains unknown. We present sensitivity estimates to detect DM particles with a future very-high-energy (\gtrsim TeV) wide field-of-view gamma-ray observatory in the Southern Hemisphere. This observatory would search for gamma rays from the annihilation or decay of DM particles in the Galactic halo. With a wide field of view, both the Galactic Center and a large fraction of the Galactic halo will be detectable with unprecedented sensitivity to DM in the mass range of ∼500 GeV to ∼2 PeV. These results, combined with those from other present and future gamma-ray observatories, will likely probe the thermal relic annihilation cross section of Weakly Interacting Massive Particles for all masses from ∼80 TeV down to the GeV range in most annihilation channels.