Status of cosmic-ray antideuteron searches

Understand

The precise measurement of cosmic-ray antiparticles serves as important means for identifying the nature of dark matter.

• Recent years showed that identifying the nature of dark matter with cosmic-ray positrons and higher energy antiprotons is difficult, and has lead to a significantly increased interest in cosmic-ray antideuteron searches.
• Antideuterons may also be generated in dark matter annihilations or decays, offering a potential breakthrough in unexplored phase space for dark matter.
• Low-energy antideuterons are an important approach because the flux from dark matter interactions exceeds the background flux by more than two orders of magnitude in the low-energy range for a wide variety of models.