Cosmic Antiproton Constraints on Effective Interactions of the Dark Matter

TL;DR

This paper uses cosmic antiproton measurements to place constraints on dark matter interactions, providing bounds comparable to collider and gamma-ray experiments through an effective interaction framework.

Contribution

It introduces a method to constrain dark matter effective interactions using antiproton flux data from PAMELA, bridging astrophysical and collider bounds.

Findings

Antiproton flux constrains dark matter interactions.

Constraints are comparable to collider and gamma-ray bounds.

Effective interaction approach is effective for indirect detection.

Abstract

Using an effective interaction approach to describe the interactions between the dark matter particle and the light degrees of freedom of the standard model, we calculate the antiproton flux due to the annihilation of the dark matter in the Galactic Halo and compare to the most recent antiproton spectrum of the PAMELA experiment. We obtain useful constraints on the size of the effective interactions that are comparable to those deduced from collider and gamma-ray experiments.