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arXiv · 2303.11363

The Strong Force meets the Dark Sector: a robust estimate of QCD uncertainties for anti-matter dark matter searches

Adil Jueid·Jochem Kip·Roberto Ruiz de Austri·Peter Skands
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Abstract

In dark-matter annihilation channels to hadronic final states, stable particles -- such as positrons, photons, antiprotons, and antineutrinos -- are produced via complex sequences of phenomena including QED/QCD radiation, hadronisation, and hadron decays. These processes are normally modelled by Monte Carlo event generators whose limited accuracy imply intrinsic QCD uncertainties on the predictions for indirect-detection experiments like Fermi-LAT, Pamela, IceCube or AMS-02. In this article, we perform a complete analysis of QCD uncertainties in antimatter spectra from dark-matter annihilation, based on parametric variations of the Pythia 8 event generator. After performing several retunings of light-quark fragmentation functions, we define a set of variations that span a conservative estimate of the QCD uncertainties. We estimate the effects on antimatter spectra for various annihilation channels and final-state particle species, and discuss their impact on fitted values for the dark-matter mass and thermally-averaged annihilation cross section. We find dramatic impacts which can go up to $\mathcal{O}(40)$ GeV for uncertainties on the dark-matter mass and up to $\mathcal{O}(10\%)$ for the annihilation cross section. We provide the spectra in tabulated form including QCD uncertainties and code snippets to perform fast dark-matter fits, in this https://github.com/ajueid/qcd-dm.github.io.git repository.

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Adil Jueid, Jochem Kip, Roberto Ruiz de Austri, Peter Skands. 2023-03-20. The Strong Force meets the Dark Sector: a robust estimate of QCD uncertainties for anti-matter dark matter searches. https://arxiv.org/abs/2303.11363

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