VTechWorks staff will be away for the winter holidays starting Tuesday, December 24, 2024, through Wednesday, January 1, 2025, and will not be replying to requests during this time. Thank you for your patience, and happy holidays!

Browsing by Author "Macias, Oscar"

Now showing 1 - 3 of 3
  • Thumbnail Image
    The Andromeda gamma-ray excess: background systematics of the millisecond pulsars and dark matter interpretations
    Zimmer, Fabian; Macias, Oscar; Ando, Shin'ichiro; Crocker, Roland M.; Horiuchi, Shunsaku (Oxford University Press, 2022-09)
    Since the discovery of an excess in gamma rays in the direction of M31, its cause has been unclear. Published interpretations focus on dark matter or stellar related origins. Studies of a similar excess in the Milky Way centre motivate a correlation of the spatial morphology of the signal with the distribution of stellar mass in M31. However, a robust determination of the best theory for the observed excess emission is challenging due to uncertainties in the astrophysical gamma-ray foreground model. We perform a spectro-morphological analysis of the M31 gamma-ray excess using state-of-the-art templates for the distribution of stellar mass in M31 and novel astrophysical foreground models for its sky region. We construct maps for the old stellar populations of M31 based on data from the PAndAS survey and carefully remove the foreground stars. We also produce improved astrophysical foreground models via novel image inpainting techniques based on machine learning methods. Our stellar maps, mimicking the location of a population of millisecond pulsars in the bulge of M31, reach a 5.4 sigma significance, making them as strongly favoured as the simple phenomenological models usually considered in the literature, e.g. disc-like templates. This detection is robust to generous variations of the astrophysical foreground model. Once the stellar templates are included in the astrophysical model, we show that the dark matter annihilation interpretation of the signal is unwarranted. We demonstrate that about one million unresolved millisecond pulsars naturally explain the observed gamma-ray luminosity per stellar mass, energy spectrum, and stellar bulge-to-disc flux ratio.
  • Thumbnail Image
    Strong constraints on thermal relic dark matter from Fermi-LAT observations of the Galactic Center
    Abazajian, Kevork N.; Horiuchi, Shunsaku; Kaplinghat, Manoj; Keeley, Ryan E.; Macias, Oscar (2020-08-20)
    The extended excess toward the Galactic Center (GC) in gamma rays inferred from Fermi-LAT observations has been interpreted as being due to dark matter (DM) annihilation. Here, we perform new likelihood analyses of the GC and show that, when including templates for the stellar galactic and nuclear bulges, the GC shows no significant detection of a DM annihilation template, even after generous variations in the Galactic diffuse emission models and a wide range of DM halo profiles. We include Galactic diffuse emission models with combinations of three-dimensional inverse Compton maps, variations of interstellar gas maps, and a central source of electrons. For the DM profile, we include both spherical and ellipsoidal DM morphologies and a range of radial profiles from steep cusps to kiloparsec-sized cores, motivated in part by hydrodynamical simulations. Our derived upper limits on the dark matter annihilation flux place strong constraints on DM properties. In the case of the pure b-quark annihilation channel, our limits on the annihilation cross section are more stringent than those from the Milky Way dwarfs up to DM masses of approximately TeV and rule out the thermal relic cross section up to approximately 300 GeV. Better understanding of the DM profile, as well as the Fermi-LAT data at its highest energies, would further improve the sensitivity to DM properties.
  • Thumbnail Image
    Supernova Physics at DUNE
    Ankowski, Artur M.; Beacom, John; Benhar, Omar; Chen, Sun; Cherry, J. J.; Cui, Yanou; Friedland, Alexander; Gil-Botella, Ines; Haghighat, Alireza; Horiuchi, Shunsaku; Huber, Patrick; Kneller, James; Laha, Ranjan; Li, Shirley; Link, Jonathan M.; Lovato, Alessandro; Macias, Oscar; Mariani, Camillo; Mezzacappa, Anthony; O'Connor, Evan; O'Sullivan, Erin; Rubbia, Andre; Scholberg, Kate; Takeuchi, Tatsu (2016)
    The DUNE/LBNF program aims to address key questions in neutrino physics and astroparticle physics. Realizing DUNE’s potential to reconstruct low-energy particles in the 10–100 MeV energy range will bring significant benefits for all DUNE’s science goals. In neutrino physics, low-energy sensitivity will improve neutrino energy reconstruction in the GeV range relevant for the kinematics of DUNE’s long-baseline oscillation program. In astroparticle physics, low-energy capabilities will make DUNE’s far detectors the world’s best apparatus for studying the electron-neutrino flux from a supernova. This will open a new window to unrivaled studies of the dynamics and neutronization of a star’s central core in real time, the potential discovery of the neutrino mass hierarchy, provide new sensitivity to physics beyond the Standard Model, and evidence of neutrino quantum-coherence effects. The same capabilities will also provide new sensitivity to ‘boosted dark matter’ models that are not observable in traditional direct dark matter detectors.