Dark Matter Detection with Hard X-ray Telescopes
(2 votes over all institutions)
We analyze the impact of future hard X-ray observations on the search for indirect signatures of particle dark matter in large extragalactic systems such as nearby clusters or groups of galaxies. We argue that the hard X-ray energy band falls squarely at the peak of the inverse Compton emission from electrons and positrons produced by dark matter annihilation or decay for a large class of dark matter models. Specifically, the most promising are low-mass models with a hard electron-positron annihilation final state spectrum and intermediate-mass models with a soft electron-positron spectrum. We find that constraints on dark matter models similar to the current constraints from the Fermi Gamma-Ray Space Telescope will be close to the limit of the sensitivity of the near-term hard X-ray telescopes NuSTAR and ASTRO-H for relatively long observations, but an instrument similar to the Wide Field Imager proposed for the International X-ray Observatory would allow significant gains to be made. In the future, the ability to probe low to intermediate dark matter particle masses with hard X-ray observations may provide a good complement to next-generation gamma-ray instruments like the Cherenkov Telescope Array (CTA) which will be sensitive to high-energy gamma-rays and thus only to relatively large particle masses.
