Prospects of antideuteron detection from dark matter annihilations or decays at AMS-02 and GAPS

Understand

The search for cosmic antideuterons has been proposed as a promising method to indirectly detect dark matter, due to the very small background flux from spallations expected at the energies relevant to experiments.

• The antideuteron flux from dark matter annihilations or decays is, however, severely constrained by the non-observation of an excess in the antiproton-to-proton fraction measured by PAMELA.
• In this paper we calculate, for representative dark matter annihilation and decay channels, upper limits on the number of antideuteron events at AMS-02 and GAPS from requiring that the associated antiproton flux is in agreement with the PAMELA data.
• To this end, we first analyze in detail the formation of antideuterons in the coalescence model using an event-by-event Monte Carlo simulation and using data from various high energy experiments.