From Pamela to CDMS and Back

Understand

We take the recent result from the CDMS collaboration as a hint that the dark matter has an elastic scattering cross section with the nucleon in the vicinity of 10^-7 pb.

• By crossing symmetry such a cross section implies annihilation of dark matter into hadrons inside the halo, resulting in an anti-proton flux that could be constrained by data from the PAMELA collaboration if one includes a large boost factor necessary to explain the PAMELA excess in the positron fraction.
• As an illustration, we present a model-independent analysis for a fermionic dark matter and study the upper bound on the boost factor using the PAMELA anti-proton flux.