The Dark Matter Discovery Potential of the Advanced Particle-Astrophysics Telescope (APT)

TL;DR

The paper assesses the potential of the proposed APT to detect dark matter signals from dwarf galaxies, promising significant constraints and tests of dark matter models, including the Galactic Center Excess.

Contribution

It evaluates APT's sensitivity to dark matter in dwarf galaxies and predicts its capability to test dark matter scenarios and the Galactic Center Excess.

Findings

APT can constrain dark matter masses up to 600 GeV.

APT could detect multiple dwarf galaxies with high significance.

Observations can test the proportionality between gamma-ray fluxes and J-factors.

Abstract

Gamma-ray observations of Milky Way dwarf galaxies have been used to place stringent constraints on the dark matter's annihilation cross section. In this paper, we evaluate the sensitivity of the proposed Advanced Particle-astrophysics Telescope (APT) to dark matter in these systems, finding that such an instrument would be capable of constraining thermal relics with masses as large as $m_X\sim 600 \, {\rm GeV}$. Furthermore, in dark matter scenarios motivated by the observed Galactic Center Gamma-Ray Excess, we predict that APT would detect several dwarf galaxies with high-significance. Such observations could be used to test the predicted proportionality between the gamma-ray fluxes and $J$-factors of individual dwarf galaxies, providing us with an unambiguous test of the origin of the Galactic Center Excess.