Constraints to dark matter annihilation from high-latitude hawc unidentified sources
Entity
UAM. Departamento de Física TeóricaPublisher
MDPIDate
2019-12-30Citation
10.3390/galaxies8010005
Galaxies 8.1 (2020): 5
ISSN
2075-4434 (online)DOI
10.3390/galaxies8010005Funded by
J.C.-B. and M.A.S.-C. are supported by the Atracción de Talento contract no. 2016-T1/TIC-1542 granted by the Comunidad de Madrid in Spain, by the Spanish Agencia Estatal de Investigación through the grants PGC2018-095161-B-I00, IFT Centro de Excelencia Severo Ochoa SEV-2016-0597, and Red Consolider MultiDark FPA2017-90566-REDCProject
Gobierno de España. PGC2018-095161-B-I00Editor's Version
https://doi.org/10.3390/galaxies8010005Subjects
Dark matter; Subhalos; Dark matter searches; Gamma-rays; FísicaRights
© 2019 by the authorsAbstract
The ΛCDM cosmological framework predicts the existence of thousands of subhalos in
our own Galaxy not massive enough to retain baryons and become visible. Yet, some of them may
outshine in gamma rays provided that the dark matter is made of weakly interacting massive particles
(WIMPs), which would self-annihilate and would appear as unidentified gamma-ray sources (unIDs)
in gamma-ray catalogs. Indeed, unIDs have proven to be competitive targets for dark matter searches
with gamma rays. In this work, we focus on the three high-latitude (|b| ≥ 10) sources present
in the 2HWC catalog of the High Altitude Water Cherenkov (HAWC) observatory with no clear
associations at other wavelengths. Indeed, only one of these sources, 2HWC J1040+308, is found to
be above the HAWC detection threshold when considering 760 days of data, i.e., a factor 1.5 more
exposure time than in the original 2HWC catalog. Other gamma-ray instruments, such as Fermi-LAT
or VERITAS at lower energies, do not detect the source. Also, this unID is reported as spatially
extended, making it even more interesting in a dark matter search context. While waiting for more
data that may shed further light on the nature of this source, we set competitive upper limits on the
annihilation cross section by comparing this HAWC unID to expectations based on state-of-the-art
N-body cosmological simulations of the Galactic subhalo population. We find these constraints to be
particularly competitive for heavy WIMPs, i.e., masses above ∼25 (40) TeV in the case of the b
¯b (τ
+τ
−)
annihilation channel, reaching velocity-averaged cross section values of 2 × 10−25 (5 × 10−25) cm3
·s
−1
.
Although far from testing the thermal relic cross section value, the obtained limits are independent
and nicely complementary to those from radically different DM analyses and targets, demonstrating
once again the high potential of this DM search approach
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Google Scholar:Coronado-Blázquez, Javier
-
Sánchez-Conde, Miguel A
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