Enhanced Gamma Ray Signals in Cosmic Proton-Wimp Collisions Due to Hadronization

TL;DR

This paper demonstrates that including hadronization effects in cosmic proton-wimp collision models significantly enhances gamma ray signals, affecting their energy and angular distributions, and making them more detectable by current gamma-ray telescopes.

Contribution

It introduces the impact of hadronization on gamma ray signals from dark matter interactions with cosmic protons, extending previous parton-level analyses.

Findings

Hadronization increases photon multiplicity from hadron decays.

Photon rates are enhanced in the forward direction due to proton remnants.

Gamma ray signals from Centaurus A could be detectable with future observations.

Abstract

In this paper, we investigate the gamma ray signal produced from dark matter collisions with high energy cosmic protons. Notably, we extend past results by including important hadronization effects. Showering and hadronization produces a high multiplicity of photons from the decays of hadrons, whose rate is not suppressed by the fine structure constant. Notably, proton remnants that do not participate in hard scattering, can produce a large rate of photons in the forward direction. These effects significantly enhance the photon rate and alter the energy and angular distributions compared to previous results which used only parton level calculations. Due to this modification, the gamma ray signal from the nearby active galactic nuclei Centaurus A is potentially testable in future Fermi-LAT and HESS measurements, for a dark matter mass and coupling consistent with current XENON100 bounds.