CosmiXs: Cosmic messenger spectra for indirect dark matter searches

TL;DR

This paper improves the calculation of particle spectra from dark matter annihilation or decay by incorporating advanced electroweak corrections and tuning to experimental data, providing comprehensive spectra for cosmic ray studies.

Contribution

It introduces a new method using the Vincia shower algorithm in Pythia with electroweak corrections, and provides tabulated spectra for various particles across a wide range of dark matter masses.

Findings

Enhanced accuracy of source spectra with electroweak corrections.

Validated tuning against LEP data for better reliability.

Publicly available spectra for use in dark matter indirect detection.

Abstract

The energy spectra of particles produced from dark matter (DM) annihilation or decay are one of the fundamental ingredients to calculate the predicted fluxes of cosmic rays and radiation searched for in indirect DM detection. We revisit the calculation of the source spectra for annihilating and decaying DM using the Vincia shower algorithm in Pythia to include QED and QCD final state radiation and diagrams for the Electroweak (EW) corrections with massive bosons, not present in the default Pythia shower model. We take into account the spin information of the particles during the entire EW shower and the off-shell contributions from massive gauge bosons. Furthermore, we perform a dedicated tuning of the Vincia and Pythia parameters to LEP data on the production of pions, photons, and hyperons at the $Z$ resonance and discuss the underlying uncertainties. To enable the use of our results in DM studies, we provide the tabulated source spectra for the most relevant cosmic messenger particles, namely antiprotons, positrons, $\gamma$ rays and the three neutrino flavors, for all the fermionic and bosonic channels and DM masses between 5 GeV and 100 TeV, on https://github.com/ajueid/CosmiXs.git.