Zooming in on light relic neutralinos by direct detection and measurements of galactic antimatter

TL;DR

This paper investigates light neutralinos as dark matter candidates by analyzing DAMA's annual modulation data, considering channelling effects, and exploring their compatibility with galactic antimatter measurements, highlighting future detection prospects.

Contribution

It demonstrates that light neutralinos consistent with DAMA's modulation data also align with galactic antimatter observations, considering specific galactic models and channelling effects.

Findings

Light neutralinos fit DAMA's annual modulation region.

Compatibility with galactic antiproton data is shown.

Future antimatter measurements could further test these neutralinos.

Abstract

The DAMA Collaboration has recently analyzed its data of the extensive WIMP direct search (DAMA/NaI) which detected an annual modulation, by taking into account the channelling effect which occurs when an ion traverses a detector with a crystalline structure. Among possible implications, this Collaboration has considered the case of a coherent WIMP-nucleus interaction and then derived the form of the annual modulation region in the plane of the WIMP-nucleon cross section versus the WIMP mass, using a specific modelling for the channelling effect. In the present paper we first show that light neutralinos fit the annual modulation region also when channelling is taken into account. To discuss the connection with indirect signals consisting in galactic antimatter, in our analysis we pick up a specific galactic model, the cored isothermal-sphere. In this scheme we determine the sets of supersymmetric models selected by the annual modulation regions and then prove that these sets are compatible with the available data on galactic antiprotons. We comment on implications when other galactic distribution functions are employed. Finally, we show that future measurements on galactic antiprotons and antideuterons will be able to shed further light on the populations of light neutralinos singled out by the annual modulation data.