arXiv · 2410.00375
Cross Correlating the Unresolved Gamma-Ray Background with Cosmic Large-Scale Structure from DESI: Implications for Astrophysics and Dark Matter
Abstract
The unresolved gamma-ray background (UGRB) is a diffuse gamma-ray emission arising from numerous extragalactic sources below the detection threshold and is an important component of the gamma-ray sky. Studying the UGRB is crucial for understanding high-energy astrophysical processes in the universe and for probing fundamental physics, such as the nature of dark matter. In this work, we forecast the cross-correlation between the UGRB and galaxy catalogs from the Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument (DESI) survey. First, we study the expected astrophysical contributions to the UGRB and their cross-correlation with DESI spectroscopic galaxies. Our calculations show that the cross-correlation signal-to-noise ratio is expected to be significant, with the highest value predicted to be 20.6 for DESI luminous red galaxies due to a higher predicted overlap in the redshift distribution with the UGRB. We consider two science cases that the UGRB-spectroscopic galaxies cross-correlation can be applied to: 1) measuring the UGRB flux as a function of redshift, achieving a precision of 10\% in some redshift bins, and 2) searching for annihilating dark matter potentially up to a mass of about 300~GeV, three times higher than the currently strongest constraints. This work underscores the importance of cross correlating the UGRB with cosmic large-scale structure tracers and highlights the multiwavelength approaches to advancing our understanding of high-energy astrophysical phenomena and fundamental physics.
Explore related subjects
Keep this discovery
Bei Zhou, José Luis Bernal, Elena Pinetti, Hector Afonso G. Cruz, Marc Kamionkowski. 2024-10-01. Cross Correlating the Unresolved Gamma-Ray Background with Cosmic Large-Scale Structure from DESI: Implications for Astrophysics and Dark Matter. https://arxiv.org/abs/2410.00375
Cite the original work for its findings. Save a collection to share your selection of sources.