Searching for Dark Photon Dark Matter with Cosmic Ray Antideuterons

TL;DR

This paper explores how cosmic ray antideuteron detection can effectively identify hidden sector thermal relic dark matter, especially vector portal models with dark photons, and predicts near-future experiments will probe significant parameter space.

Contribution

It demonstrates that antideuteron experiments are highly sensitive to vector portal dark matter models, especially in the unconstrained mass range near the GeV scale, providing new detection prospects.

Findings

GAPS can probe models with $m_\chi \approx m_{A'}$ up to 100 GeV.

Dark matter models explaining the Fermi Galactic center excess can be detected or constrained.

Parameter space with $m_\chi > m_{A'} \gtrsim 20$ GeV remains largely unconstrained.

Abstract

Low energy antideuteron detection presents a unique channel for indirect detection, targeting dark matter that annihilates into hadrons in a relatively background-free way. Since the idea was first proposed, many WIMP-type models have already been disfavored by direct detection experiments, and current constraints indicate that any thermal relic candidates likely annihilate through some hidden sector process. In this paper, we show that cosmic ray antideuteron detection experiments represent one of the best ways to search for hidden sector thermal relic dark matter, and in particular investigate a vector portal dark matter that annihilates via a massive dark photon. We find that the parameter space with thermal relic annihilation and $m_\chi > m_{A'} \gtrsim 20 \, \mathrm{GeV}$ is largely unconstrained, and near future antideuteron experiment \GAPS will be able to probe models in this space with $m_\chi \approx m_{A'}$ up to masses of $O(100\,\mathrm{GeV})$. Specifically the dark matter models favored by the \textit{Fermi} Galactic center excess is expected to be detected or constrained at the $5(3)-\sigma$ level assuming a optimistic (conservative) propagation model.