Contatto di riferimento: Barbara Simoni
Partecipanti: Dr Jan Heisig (Université catholique de Louvain)
Cosmic-ray observations provide a powerful probe of dark matter annihilation in the Galaxy. In this talk I present recent analyses of the AMS-02 antiproton data, reducing cosmic-ray propagation uncertainties by fitting at the same time dark matter and cosmic-ray propagation parameters. The resulting bounds are among the strongest for heavy dark matter while for smaller masses, around or below 100GeV, the analysis exhibits a possible hint for an annihilation signal which is compatible with a thermal annihilation cross section for frozen-out dark matter. We examine the robustness of this signal by studying the effect of the most important systematic 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. While the impact of production cross section uncertainties on the significance of the excess is mild, correlation in the AMS-02 data can have a large effect. We show that their knownledge can strongly improve the constraints on the propagation model and, furthermore, enhances the significance of the dark matter signal.