Theory seminar: On the importance of Dark Matter gamma-ray spectral features

Francesca Calore, University of Amsterdam

Discovering Dark Matter (DM) interactions with ordinary matter, other than gravity, is the current challenge of DM detection experiments. Notably, the indirect detection looks for the final stable products of DM annihilation as rare components of cosmic rays.

For typical DM WIMP candidates the two-body annihilation rate today is suppressed because of helicity arguments. Luckily, the emission of an additional vector boson in the final state may play an important role in enhancing the discovery potential of this particularly well motivated DM candidate with current and future gamma-rays experiments.

I will show how the sharp spectral features at the high energy end of the gamma-ray spectrum induced by electromagnetic corrections can be promisingly looked for with gamma-ray telescopes.

I will then demonstrate that also electroweak bremsstrahlung, whose first fully general calculation in the framework of the Minimal Supersymmetric Standard Model (MSSM) I will present, might alter significantly the energy spectra of gamma rays and imply an annihilation into three-body final states at a rate several orders of magnitude above the tree-level result.