Revisit of cosmic ray antiprotons from dark matter annihilation with updated constraints on the background model from AMS-02 and collider data

TL;DR

This study revisits cosmic ray antiprotons using updated AMS-02 and collider data, employing a Bayesian approach to constrain dark matter annihilation signals and background models, suggesting a possible dark matter mass around 60-100 GeV.

Contribution

The paper introduces an improved Bayesian analysis incorporating new data to better constrain dark matter contributions to cosmic ray antiprotons.

Findings

Dark matter annihilation can significantly improve fit to antiproton data.

Favored dark matter mass is approximately 60-100 GeV.

Annihilation cross section aligns with thermal relic expectations.

Abstract

We study the cosmic ray antiprotons with updated constraints on the propagation, proton injection, and solar modulation parameters based on the newest AMS-02 data near the Earth and Voyager data in the local interstellar space, and on the cross section of antiproton production due to proton-proton collisions based on new collider data. We use a Bayesian approach to properly consider the uncertainties of the model predictions of both the background and the dark matter (DM) annihilation components of antiprotons. We find that including an extra component of antiprotons from the annihilation of DM particles into a pair of quarks can improve the fit to the AMS-02 antiproton data considerably. The favored mass of DM particles is about $60\sim100$ GeV, and the annihilation cross section is just at the level of the thermal production of DM ($\langle\sigma v\rangle \sim O(10^{-26})$ cm$^3$~s$^{-1}$).