Scrutinizing the evidence for dark matter in cosmic-ray antiprotons

Understand

Global fits of primary and secondary cosmic-ray (CR) fluxes measured by AMS-02 have great potential to study CR propagation models and search for exotic sources of antimatter such as annihilating dark matter (DM).

• Previous studies of AMS-02 antiprotons revealed a possible hint for a DM signal which, however, could be affected by systematic uncertainties.
• To test the robustness of such a DM signal, in this work we systematically study two important sources of uncertainties: the antiproton production cross sections needed to calculate the source spectra of secondary antiprotons and the potential correlations in the experimental data, so far not provided by the AMS-02 Collaboration.
• To investigate the impact of cross-section uncertainties we perform global fits of CR spectra including a covariance matrix determined from nuclear cross-section measurements.