Status, Challenges and Directions in Indirect Dark Matter Searches

TL;DR

This review summarizes the current status, challenges, and future directions of indirect dark matter searches using various astrophysical and cosmological detection methods, highlighting their complementary roles and limitations.

Contribution

It provides a comprehensive overview of existing indirect detection techniques, their recent developments, and discusses the challenges faced in identifying dark matter signals.

Findings

Multiple detection methods are used, each with unique advantages and limitations.

Current experiments have set significant constraints on dark matter properties.

Future directions include improving detector sensitivities and exploring new signatures.

Abstract

Indirect searches for dark matter are based on detecting an anomalous flux of photons, neutrinos or cosmic-rays produced in annihilations or decays of dark matter candidates gravitationally accumulated in heavy cosmological objects, like galaxies, the Sun or the Earth. Additionally, evidence for dark matter that can also be understood as indirect can be obtained from early universe probes, like fluctuations of the Cosmic Microwave Background temperature, the primordial abundance of light elements or the Hydrogen 21-cm line. The techniques needed to detect these different signatures require very different types of detectors: air shower arrays, gamma- and X-ray telescopes, Cherenkov telescopes, neutrino telescopes, radio telescopes or particle detectors in balloons or satellites. Although many of these detectors were not originally intended to search for dark matter, they have proven to be unique complementary tools to the direct search efforts. In this review we summarize the current status of indirect searches for dark matter, mentioning also the challenges and limitations that these techniques encounter.