Low energy antideuterons: shedding light on dark matter

Low energy antideuterons suffer a very low secondary and tertiary astrophysical background, while they can be abundantly synthesized in dark matter pair annihilations, therefore providing a privileged indirect dark matter detection technique. The recent publication of the first upper limit on the low energy antideuteron flux by the BESS Collaboration, a new evaluation of the standard astrophysical background, and remarkable progress in the development of a dedicated experiment, GAPS, motivate a new and accurate analysis of the antideuteron flux expected in particle dark matter models. To this extent, we consider here supersymmetric, universal extra-dimensional (UED) Kaluza–Klein and warped extra-dimensional dark matter models, and assess both the prospects for antideuteron detection and the various related sources of uncertainties. The GAPS experiment, even in a preliminary balloon-borne set-up, will explore many supersymmetric configurations, and, eventually, in its final space-borne configuration, will be sensitive to primary antideuterons over the whole cosmologically allowed UED parameter space, providing a search technique which is highly complementary with other direct and indirect dark matter detection experiments.