Indirect Detection of Decaying Dark Matter with High Angular Resolution: Case for axion search by IRCS at Subaru Telescope

Recent advances in cosmic-ray detectors have provided exceptional sensitivities of dark matter with high angular resolution. Motivated by this, we present a comprehensive study of cosmic-ray flux from dark matter decay in dwarf spheroidal galaxies (dSphs), with a focus on detectors possessing arcsecond-level field of view and/or angular resolution. We propose to use differential D-factors, which are estimated for various dSphs, since such detectors are sensitive to their dark matter distributions. Our findings reveal that the resulting signal flux can experience a more than O(1–10) enhancement with different theoretical uncertainty compared to traditional estimations. Based on this analysis, we find that the Infrared Camera and Spectrograph (IRCS) installed on the 8.2 m Subaru telescope can be a good dark matter detector for the mass in the eV range, particularly axion-like particles (ALPs). Observing the Draco or Ursa Major II galaxies with the IRCS for just a few nights will be sufficient to surpass the stellar cooling bounds for ALP dark matter with a mass in the range of approximately 1–2 eV.

Wen Yin, Kohei Hayashi