TY  - JOUR
AU  - Jueid, A.
AU  - Kip, J.
AU  - Ruiz de Austri, R.
AU  - Skands, P.
PY  - 2024
DA  - 2024//
TI  - The Strong Force meets the Dark Sector: a robust estimate of QCD uncertainties for anti-matter dark matter searches
T2  - J. High Energy Phys.
JO  - Journal of High Energy Physics
SP  - 119
EP  - 48pp
VL  - 02
IS  - 2
PB  - Springer
KW  - Cosmic Rays
KW  - Particle Nature of Dark Matter
KW  - Specific QCD Phenomenology
AB  - In dark-matter annihilation channels to hadronic final states, stable particles – such as positrons, photons, antiprotons, and antineutrinos – are produced via complex sequences of phenomena including QED/QCD radiation, hadronisation, and hadron decays. These processes are normally modelled by Monte Carlo (MC) event generators whose limited accuracy imply intrinsic QCD uncertainties on the predictions for indirect-detection experiments like Fermi-LAT, Pamela, IceCube or Ams-02. In this article, we perform a comprehensive analysis of QCD uncertainties, meaning both perturbative and nonperturbative sources of uncertainty are included – estimated via variations of MC renormalization-scale and fragmentation-function parameters, respectively – in antimatter spectra from dark-matter annihilation, based on parametric variations of the Pythia 8 event generator. After performing several retunings of light-quark fragmentation functions, we define a set of variations that span a conservative estimate of the QCD uncertainties. We estimate the effects on antimatter spectra for various annihilation channels and final-state particle species, and discuss their impact on fitted values for the dark-matter mass and thermally-averaged annihilation cross section. We find dramatic impacts which can go up to O(10%) for the annihilation cross section. We provide the spectra in tabulated form including QCD uncertainties and code snippets to perform fast dark-matter fits, in this github repository.
SN  - 1029-8479
UR  - https://arxiv.org/abs/2303.11363
UR  - https://doi.org/10.1007/JHEP02(2024)119
DO  - 10.1007/JHEP02(2024)119
LA  - English
N1  - WOS:001165531600003
ID  - Jueid_etal2024
ER  -