Ref Arxiv: 1612.07698
Ref INSPIRE: 1505562
DOI: 10.1103/PhysRevLett.119.021103
Ref. & Cit.: NASA ADS
26 citations

Ref Arxiv: 1610.02233
Ref INSPIRE: 1490641
DOI: 10.1103/PhysRevD.95.063003
Ref. & Cit.: NASA ADS
23 citations

Ref Arxiv: 1411.1325
Ref INSPIRE: 1326121
DOI: 10.1103/PhysRevD.91.023510
Ref. & Cit.: NASA ADS
16 citations

Abstract:

Direct detection (DD) of dark matter (DM) candidates in the $\lesssim$10 GeV mass range is very sensitive to the tail of their velocity distribution. The important quantity is the maximum WIMP speed in the observer's rest frame, i.e. in average the sum of the local Galactic escape speed $v_{\rm esc}$ and of the circular velocity of the Sun $v_c$. While the latter has been receiving continuous attention, the former is more difficult to constrain. The RAVE Collaboration has just released a new estimate of $v_{\rm esc}$ (Piffl {\em et al.}, 2014 --- P14) that supersedes the previous one (Smith {\em et al.}, 2007), which is of interest in the perspective of reducing the astrophysical uncertainties in DD. Nevertheless, these new estimates cannot be used blindly as they rely on assumptions in the dark halo modeling which induce tight correlations between the escape speed and other local astrophysical parameters. We make a self-consistent study of the implications of the RAVE results on DD assuming isotropic DM velocity distributions, both Maxwellian and ergodic. Taking as references the experimental sensitivities currently achieved by LUX, CRESST-II, and SuperCDMS, we show that: (i) the exclusion curves associated with the best-fit points of P14 may be more constraining by up to $\sim 40$\% with respect to standard limits, because the underlying astrophysical correlations induce a larger local DM density; (ii) the corresponding relative uncertainties inferred in the low WIMP mass region may be moderate, down to 10-15\% below 10 GeV. We finally discuss the level of consistency of these results with other independent astrophysical constraints. This analysis is complementary to others based on rotation curves.

Ref HAL: hal-01021892_v1
Exporter : BibTex | endNote
Abstract:

Galactic Cosmic-ray (CR) transport parameters are usually constrained by the boron-to-carbon ratio. This procedure is generically plagued with degeneracies between the diffusion coefficient and the vertical extent of the Galactic magnetic halo. The latter is of paramount importance for indirect dark matter (DM) searches, because it fixes the amount of DM annihilation or decay that contributes to the local antimatter CR flux. These degeneracies could be broken by using secondary radioactive species, but the current data still have large error bars, and this method is extremely sensitive to the very local interstellar medium (ISM) properties. Here, we propose to use the low-energy CR positrons in the GeV range as another direct constraint on diffusion models. We show that the PAMELA data disfavor small diffusion halo ($L\lesssim 3$ kpc) and large diffusion slope models, and exclude the minimal ({\em min}) configuration (Maurin et al. 2001, Donato et al. 2004) widely used in the literature to bracket the uncertainties in the DM signal predictions. This is complementary to indirect constraints (diffuse radio and gamma-ray emissions) and has strong impact on DM searches. Indeed this makes the antiproton constraints more robust while enhancing the discovery/exclusion potential of current and future experiments, like AMS-02 and GAPS, especially in the antiproton and antideuteron channels.

Ref HAL: hal-00993487_v1
Exporter : BibTex | endNote

Ref HAL: hal-00777563_v1
Ref Arxiv: 1207.2476
DOI: 10.1088/1475-7516/2012/11/021
Ref. & Cit.: NASA ADS
Exporter : BibTex | endNote
18 citations
Comments: 32 pages. V2: changes to match the version accepted for publication in JCAP Journal: JCAP 11 (2012) 021