Ultra high energy cosmic rays from super-heavy dark matter in the context of large exposure observatories

A D SUPANITSKY; G. A. MEDINA-TANCO

JOURNAL OF COSMOLOGY AND ASTROPARTICLE PHYSICS

IOP PUBLISHING LTD

Lugar: Londres; Año: 2019 vol. 11 p. 1 - 16

1475-7516

The origin of the ultra high energy cosmic rays (UHECRs, E > 10^18 eV) is stilluncertain. However, great progress has been achieved due to the data taken by The PierreAuger and Telescope Array observatories. The UHECR flux presents two main features, ahardening of the spectrum known as the ankle and a suppression at higher energies. Theexperimental data suggest that above the ankle the UHECRs flux is dominated by an extra-galactic component of astrophysical origin. However, a minority component of exotic originthat dominates the flux beyond the suppression is still compatible with current data. There-fore, there exist the possibility that part of the UHECR flux originates from the decay ofsuper-heavy dark matter particles clustered in the halos of the galaxies. In these scenariosthe main contribution comes from the halo of our galaxy. In this article the possibility ofidentifying these scenarios in the context of the future very large exposure cosmic rays ob-servatories is studied. It is worth mentioning that the contribution of the extragalactic haloslocated in the nearby universe is also included in these studies.