Date Thesis Awarded

7-2012

Access Type

Honors Thesis -- Access Restricted On-Campus Only

Degree Name

Bachelors of Science (BS)

Department

Physics

Advisor

Christopher D. Carone

Committee Members

Joshua Erlich

Gexin Yu

Henry Krakauer

Abstract

We consider possible leptonic three-body decays of spin-1/2 charge-asymmetric dark matter. Assuming a general Dirac structure for the four-fermion contact interactions of interest, we study the cosmic-ray electron and positron spectra and show that good fits to the current data can be obtained for both charged-lepton-flavor-conserving and flavor-violating decay channels. We find that different choices for the Dirac structure of the underlying decay operator can be significantly compensated by different choices for the dark-matter mass and lifetime. The decay modes we consider provide differing predictions for the cosmic-ray positron fraction at energies higher than those currently probed at the PAMELA experiment; these predictions might be tested at cosmic-ray detectors like AMS-02. Additionally, we consider the constraints imposed on these decays by neutrino and gamma-ray observatories.

Creative Commons License

Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 License.

Comments

Thesis is part of Honors ETD pilot project, 2008-2013. Migrated from Dspace in 2016.

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