Researchers from the National Taiwan University, including Sahabub Jahedi, Jin-Han Liang, Yi Liao, Xiao-Dong Ma, and Yoshiki Uchida, have recently delved into a relatively unexplored area of dark matter (DM) research. Their study, titled “A systematic study of lepton flavor violating dark matter interactions via indirect detection in effective field theories,” was published in the Journal of High Energy Physics.
The team investigated lepton flavor violating (LFV) interactions involving dark matter particles using effective field theories. LFV interactions are processes where a particle changes from one lepton flavor to another, such as an electron transforming into a muon or tau particle. These interactions are typically forbidden in the Standard Model of particle physics but could occur in theories involving dark matter.
The researchers analyzed astrophysical photons and positrons produced from dark matter annihilation, using data collected by the Fermi Large Area Telescope (Fermi-LAT), INTEGRAL, XMM-Newton, and Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer-02 (AMS-02). They placed constraints on all leading-order effective operators involving a pair of dark matter particles and a pair of charged leptons with different flavors.
The study covered three well-known dark matter candidates: a scalar, a fermion, and a vector particle. For the photon flux, the team considered contributions from final-state radiation, radiative decay, and inverse Compton scattering. They examined the sensitivity regions across different dark matter masses and photon energies.
The findings revealed that for dark matter masses below approximately 20 GeV, the INTEGRAL satellite provided the most stringent constraints on annihilation cross sections and effective operators in all three LFV channels. Above this mass threshold, AMS-02 offered the strongest constraints.
While this research does not directly impact the energy industry, it contributes to our understanding of dark matter, which could have implications for future energy technologies. For instance, if dark matter properties can be harnessed or controlled, it might lead to innovative energy solutions. However, this remains speculative, and the current study focuses on advancing our fundamental knowledge of dark matter interactions.
Source: Journal of High Energy Physics
This article is based on research available at arXiv.