Prospects of detecting dark matter through cosmic-ray antihelium with the antiproton constraints

by Dr 楠 李 (中科院理论物理所)

Thursday 2 Jan 2020, 12:00 → 13:00 Asia/Shanghai

3503 (北京工业大学应用数理学院)

摘要：Cosmic-ray (CR) antihelium is an important observable for dark matter (DM) indirect searches due to extremely low secondary backgrounds towards low energies. In a given DM model, the predicted CR antihelium flux is expected to be strongly correlated with that of CR antiprotons. We use the AMS-02 $\bar{p}/p$ data to constrain the DM annihilation cross section, and the ALICE data on the antihelium and antitriton productions to determine the parameters in the coalescence model for anti-nucleus formation. Based on these constraints, we make predictions for the maximal antihelium flux for typical DM annihilation final states, and perform a detailed analysis on the uncertainties due to the DM density profiles and CR propagation models. We show that with very optimistic assumptions, CR antihelium is within the reach of the AMS-02 experiment, and the events which can be observed by AMS-02 are likely to arise dominantly from secondary backgrounds rather than DM interactions