English

Probing heavy dark matter decays with multi-messenger astrophysical data

High Energy Astrophysical Phenomena 2020-02-03 v2 Cosmology and Nongalactic Astrophysics High Energy Physics - Phenomenology

Abstract

We set conservative constraints on decaying dark matter particles with masses spanning a very wide range (104101610^4-10^{16} GeV). For this we use multimessenger observations of cosmic-ray (CR) protons/antiprotons, electrons/positrons, neutrinos/antineutrinos and gamma rays. Focusing on decays into the bˉb\bar{b}b channel, we simulate the spectra of dark matter yields by using the Dokshitzer-Gribov-Lipatov-Altarelli-Parisi equations and the Pythia\texttt{Pythia} package. We then propagate the CRs of dark matter origin till Earth by using the state-of-the-art numerical frameworks CRPropa\texttt{CRPropa}, GALPROP\texttt{GALPROP} and HelMod\texttt{HelMod} for the solution of the CR transport equation in the extragalactic, Galactic region and the heliosphere, respectively. Conservative limits are obtained by requiring that the predicted dark matter spectra at Earth be less than the observed CR spectra. Overall, we exclude dark matter lifetimes of 102810^{28} s or shorter for all the masses investigated in this work. The most stringent constraints reach 103010^{30} s for very heavy dark matter particles with masses in the range 1011101410^{11}-10^{14} GeV.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1907.11671,
  title  = {Probing heavy dark matter decays with multi-messenger astrophysical data},
  author = {Koji Ishiwata and Oscar Macias and Shin'ichiro Ando and Makoto Arimoto},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1907.11671},
  year   = {2020}
}

Comments

22 pages, 10 figures, V2: Minor changes to match JCAP published version

R2 v1 2026-06-23T10:32:11.887Z