Constraining the Higgs portal with antiprotons

Understand

The scalar Higgs portal is a compelling model of dark matter (DM) in which a renormalizable coupling with the Higgs boson provides the connection between the visible world and the dark sector.

• In this paper we investigate the constraint placed on the parameter space of this model by the antiproton data.
• Due to the fact that the antiproton-to-proton ratio has relative less systematic uncertainties than the antiproton absolute flux, we propose and explore the possibility to combine all the available $\bar{p}/p$ data.
• Following this approach, we are able to obtain stronger limits if compared with the existing literature.