Speaker
Andrea Vittino
(Universita' di Torino and IPhT/CEA Saclay)
Description
Light anti-nuclei, namely anti-deuteron and anti-helium, can be produced through the nuclear coalescence of the anti-protons and the anti-neutrons that are originated in a dark matter pair annihilation event. At low kinetic energies, the fluxes of these bound states are found to dominate over the astrophysical background and thus anti-nuclei may be considered as a very promising channel for a dark matter indirect detection, especially for WIMPs with a low or intermediate mass. In this talk, an overview on the principal issues related both to the anti-nuclei production and to their subsequent propagation through the interstellar medium and the heliosphere will be given. Then, the capability of current and future experiments to detect a light anti-nuclei flux produced by dark matter annihilation will be investigated in relation to the constraints on the dark matter annihilation cross section that can be derived from the latest measurements of the cosmic anti-proton flux.
Author
Andrea Vittino
(Universita' di Torino and IPhT/CEA Saclay)
Co-authors
Luca Maccione
(DESY)
Marco Cirelli
(IPhT CNRS/CEA Saclay)
Marco Taoso
Nicolao Fornengo
(University of Torino and INFN/Torino)
