Detecting dark matter with cosmic rays: the sub-structure issue

by Dr Julien Lavalle (U. of Torino)

Wednesday 10 Jun 2009, 11:00 → 12:00 Europe/Zurich

1/1-025 (CERN)

We will discuss the role that dark matter sub-halos can play for the detection of dark matter annihilation in the cosmic antimatter spectrum, especially in the positron spectrum. More precisely, we will explain why the so-called boost factor (i) is different from the one derived for gamma rays, (ii) depends on the antimatter cosmic ray energy and (iii) is expected to be small contrarily to what was widely assumed in many previous works.

References:

(i) Original idea: Silk & Stebbins (1993)
(ii) Dark matter subhalo survival in the Galaxy and boosted gamma-ray flux: Berezinsky et al. (2008)
(iii) Effects of clumps for detection of dark matter with antimatter cosmic rays: Lavalle et al. (2008)