Speaker
Fabrizio Vassallo
(University of Wisconsin-Madison)
Description
Antideuterons and antihelium in cosmic rays are widely regarded as smoking-gun signatures of dark matter annihilation. The tentative AMS observations are therefore intriguing, but difficult to explain within conventional models, which predict negligible antihelium fluxes. We propose a class of scenarios in which dark matter annihilates into particles carrying baryon and lepton number. Their decays enhance antinucleon and antinucleus production, yielding order-of-magnitude increases in antideuteron and antihelium-3 fluxes. Motivated by Grand Unified Theories, this framework provides a simple and testable explanation for the AMS antinuclei candidates.
Authors
Caleb Gemmell
(University of Toronto)
Dan Hooper
(University of Wisconsin, Madison)
Fabrizio Vassallo
(University of Wisconsin-Madison)
Seth Koren
(University of Notre Dame)