Abstract
With a mass of approximately ∼1012 solar masses, the Galactic Halo is the closest known large dark matter halo and a prime candidate for indirect dark matter detection. The High-Altitude Water Cherenkov Observatory (HAWC) is a high energy (300 GeV to 100 TeV) gamma ray detector located in central Mexico. HAWC operates via the water Cherenkov technique and has both a wide field of view of ∼2 sr and a >95% duty cycle, making it ideal for analysis of highly extended sources. We made use of these properties of HAWC, and a new background-estimation technique optimized for extended sources to probe a large region of the Galactic Halo for dark matter signals. With this approach and taking into account electroweak corrections to the gamma-ray spectra, we set improved constraints on dark matter annihilation and decay between masses of 10 and 100 TeV. Our constraints also take into account detector simulation systematics and are robust against uncertainties in the Galactic dark matter spatial profile.
Recommended Citation
J. Lundeen et al., "An Optimized Search For Dark Matter In The Galactic Halo With HAWC," Proceedings of Science, vol. 395, article no. 531, Sissa Medialab Srl, Mar 2022.
The definitive version is available at https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2305.09861
Department(s)
Physics
International Standard Serial Number (ISSN)
1824-8039
Document Type
Article - Conference proceedings
Document Version
Citation
File Type
text
Language(s)
English
Rights
© 2025 Sissa Medialab Srl, All rights reserved.
Publication Date
18 Mar 2022
Comments
National Science Foundation, Grant PRODEP-SEP UDG-CA-499