Status of cosmic-ray antideuteron searches

TL;DR

Cosmic-ray antideuteron searches are a promising method for dark matter detection, with recent workshops highlighting their potential, current challenges, and the importance of low-energy antideuterons due to their higher signal-to-background ratio.

Contribution

This paper provides a comprehensive review of the current status, theoretical uncertainties, and experimental efforts in cosmic-ray antideuteron searches for dark matter identification.

Findings

Antideuterons offer a promising signal for dark matter due to low background at certain energies.

Recent experimental and theoretical uncertainties are discussed, highlighting challenges in detection.

The workshop summarized current progress and future perspectives in the field.

Abstract

The precise measurement of cosmic-ray antiparticles serves as important means for identifying the nature of dark matter. Recent years showed that identifying the nature of dark matter with cosmic-ray positrons and higher energy antiprotons is difficult, and has lead to a significantly increased interest in cosmic-ray antideuteron searches. Antideuterons may also be generated in dark matter annihilations or decays, offering a potential breakthrough in unexplored phase space for dark matter. Low-energy antideuterons are an important approach because the flux from dark matter interactions exceeds the background flux by more than two orders of magnitude in the low-energy range for a wide variety of models. This review is based on the "dbar14 - dedicated cosmic-ray antideuteron workshop", which brought together theorists and experimentalists in the field to discuss the current status, perspectives, and challenges for cosmic-ray antideuteron searches and discusses the motivation for antideuteron searches, the theoretical and experimental uncertainties of antideuteron production and propagation in our Galaxy, as well as give an experimental cosmic-ray antideuteron search status update. This report is a condensed summary of the article "Review of the theoretical and experimental status of dark matter identification with cosmic-ray antideuteron" (arXiv:1505.07785).