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Proceedings of 37th International Cosmic Ray Conference — PoS(ICRC2021), 2021

DOI: 10.22323/1.395.0538

arXiv, 2021

DOI: 10.48550/arxiv.2106.00551

American Astronomical Society, Astrophysical Journal, 1(918), p. 17, 2021

DOI: 10.3847/1538-4357/abff59

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Search for Dark Matter Annihilation Signals from Unidentified Fermi-LAT Objects with H.E.S.S.

Journal article published in 2021 by H. Abdallah, G. Fichet de Clairfontaine ORCID, F. Ait Benkhali, Hess, Oguzhan Anguener, M. de Naurois, P. Brun, M. Bryan, J. H. E. Thiersen, V. Barbosa Martins, M. Büchele, Rowan Batzofin, A. Carosi, Konrad Bernloehr, Celine Armand and other authors.
This paper is made freely available by the publisher.
This paper is made freely available by the publisher.

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Data provided by SHERPA/RoMEO

Abstract

Cosmological $N$-body simulations show that Milky Way-sized galaxies harbor a population of unmerged dark matter subhalos. These subhalos could shine in gamma-rays and be eventually detected in gamma-ray surveys as unidentified sources. We performed a thorough selection among unidentified Fermi-LAT Objects (UFOs) to identify them as possible TeV-scale dark matter subhalo candidates. We search for very-high-energy (E $\gtrsim$ 100 GeV) gamma-ray emissions using H.E.S.S. observations towards four selected UFOs. Since no significant very-high-energy gamma-ray emission is detected in any dataset of the four observed UFOs nor in the combined UFO dataset, strong constraints are derived on the product of the velocity-weighted annihilation cross section $〈 σv 〉$ by the $J$-factor for the dark matter models. The 95% C.L. observed upper limits derived from combined H.E.S.S. observations reach $〈 σv 〉 J$ values of 3.7$\times$10$^{-5}$ and 8.1$\times$10$^{-6}$ GeV$^2$cm$^{-2}$s$^{-1}$ in the $W^+W^-$ and $τ^+τ^-$ channels, respectively, for a 1 TeV dark matter mass. Focusing on thermal WIMPs, the H.E.S.S. constraints restrict the $J$-factors to lie in the range 6.1$\times$10$^{19}$ - 2.0$\times$10$^{21}$ GeV$^2$cm$^{-5}$, and the masses to lie between 0.2 and 6 TeV in the $W^+W^-$ channel. For the $τ^+τ^-$ channel, the $J$-factors lie in the range 7.0$\times$10$^{19}$ - 7.1$\times$10$^{20}$ GeV$^2$cm$^{-5}$ and the masses lie between 0.2 and 0.5 TeV. Assuming model-dependent predictions from cosmological N-body simulations on the $J$-factor distribution for Milky Way-sized galaxies, the dark matter models with masses greater than 0.3 TeV for the UFO emissions can be ruled out at high confidence level.