Dark matter line searches with the Cherenkov Telescope Array

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Volume Title

A1 Alkuperäisartikkeli tieteellisessä aikakauslehdessä

Date

2024-07-01

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en

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Journal of Cosmology and Astroparticle Physics, Volume 2024, issue 7

Abstract

Monochromatic gamma-ray signals constitute a potential smoking gun signature for annihilating or decaying dark matter particles that could relatively easily be distinguished from astrophysical or instrumental backgrounds. We provide an updated assessment of the sensitivity of the Cherenkov Telescope Array (CTA) to such signals, based on observations of the Galactic centre region as well as of selected dwarf spheroidal galaxies. We find that current limits and detection prospects for dark matter masses above 300 GeV will be significantly improved, by up to an order of magnitude in the multi-TeV range. This demonstrates that CTA will set a new standard for gamma-ray astronomy also in this respect, as the world's largest and most sensitive high-energy gamma-ray observatory, in particular due to its exquisite energy resolution at TeV energies and the adopted observational strategy focussing on regions with large dark matter densities. Throughout our analysis, we use up-to-date instrument response functions, and we thoroughly model the effect of instrumental systematic uncertainties in our statistical treatment. We further present results for other potential signatures with sharp spectral features, e.g. box-shaped spectra, that would likewise very clearly point to a particle dark matter origin.

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Publisher Copyright: © 2024 The Author(s).

Keywords

dark matter experiments, dark matter theory, gamma ray experiments

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Citation

Hovatta, T & The CTAO Consortium 2024, ' Dark matter line searches with the Cherenkov Telescope Array ', Journal of Cosmology and Astroparticle Physics, vol. 2024, no. 7, 047 . https://doi.org/10.1088/1475-7516/2024/07/047