Contributor info: Dr Olivier Deligny

Olivier Deligny for the Pierre Auger Collaboration

SciPost Phys. Proc. 13, 013 (2023) · published 28 September 2023 | Toggle abstract · pdf

Assuming that the energy density of super-heavy particles matches that of dark matter observed today, tight constraints on the couplings governing the decay process are presented as a function of the particle mass. These constraints are obtained from the lack of signatures that would be suggestive of decaying super-heavy $X$ particles in the data of the Pierre Auger Observatory. In particular, instanton-induced decay processes allow us to derive a bound on the reduced coupling constant of gauge interactions in the dark sector: $\alpha_X \lesssim 0.09$, for $10^{9} \lesssim M_X/\mathrm{GeV} < 10^{19}$. Cosmological aspects for super-heavy dark matter production during the reheating epoch are discussed.

Isaac J. Arnquist, Nicolas Avalos, Philippe Bailly, David Baxter, Xavier Bertou, Mircea Bogdan, Christian Bourgeois, J. Brandt, Arnaud Cadiou, Nuria Castelló-Mor, Alvaro E. Chavarria, Marcel Conde, Nicholas J. Corso, J. C. Gutiérrez, Julian Cuevas-Zepeda, Ali Dastgheibi-Fard, Claudia De Dominicis, Olivier Deligny, R. Desani, Marc Dhellot, Jean-Jacques Dormard, Jordi Duarte-Campderros, E. Estrada, D. Florin, N. Gadola, R. Gaïor, J. González Sánchez, Todd W. Hossbach, Michael Huehn, Latifa Khalil, Ben Kilminster, Agustin Lantero-Barreda, Ian Lawson, Hervé Lebbolo, Steven Lee, Pascal Leray, Antoine Letessier-Selvon, Pia Loaiza, Amparo Lopez-Virto, David Martin, Ariel Matalon, Kellie McGuire, T. Milleto, Pitam Mitra, David M. Martin, S. Munagavalasa, Danielle Norcini, Cory T. Overman, Giorgos Papadopoulos, S. Paul, David Peterson, Alexander Piers, Olivier Pochon, Paolo Privitera, Karthik Ramanathan, Denis Reynet, Peter Robmann, Ryan Roehnelt, Mariangela Settimo, Radomir Smida, Ben Stillwell, Ryan Thomas, Michelangelo Traina, Philippe Vallerand, Tim Van Wechel, Ivan Vila, Rocio V. Cortabitarte, Achim Vollhardt, Guillaume Warot, D. Wolf, Rachana Yajur, J-P. Zopounidis

SciPost Phys. Proc. 12, 014 (2023) · published 3 July 2023 | Toggle abstract · pdf

The DAMIC-M (DArk Matter In CCDs at Modane) experiment employs thick, fully depleted silicon charged-coupled devices (CCDs) to search for dark matter particles with a target exposure of 1 kg-year. A novel skipper readout implemented in the CCDs provides single electron resolution through multiple non-destructive measurements of the individual pixel charge, pushing the detection threshold to the eV-scale. DAMIC-M will advance by several orders of magnitude the exploration of the dark matter particle hypothesis, in particular of candidates pertaining to the so-called "hidden sector." A prototype, the Low Background Chamber (LBC), with 20g of low background Skipper CCDs, has been recently installed at Laboratoire Souterrain de Modane and is currently taking data. We will report the status of the DAMIC-M experiment and first results obtained with LBC commissioning data.