Caught by its own light: Wimpzillas, the LHAASO knee and the diffuse gamma-ray sky
astro-ph.HE, astro-ph.CO, hep-ph
Submitted: 2026-09-15
Updated: 2026-09-15
Comments: 14 pages plus 3 appendices. 4 figures
License: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
The gist: We use the proton spectrum resolved by LHAASO across the knee to test superheavy dark matter in the nucleon channel at PeV energies.
Terminology
Abstract
We use the proton spectrum resolved by LHAASO across the knee to test superheavy dark matter in the nucleon channel at PeV energies. Both the hardening at 0.34 PeV and the knee at 3.3 PeV are reproduced by nucleons from a relic of mass 5 times 10 7 GeV decaying in the Galactic halo, with the mass as the only shape parameter of the spectrum and the background index profiled under an independent prior on the proton slope below 0.1 PeV. It works equally well in all three hadronic-interaction-model reconstructions. On the other hand, the photons of the same cascade rule out this interpretation by about two orders of magnitude against the photon fraction of the cosmic radiation, and by about one order of magnitude against the LHAASO diffuse Galactic emission.
Sources
- Precise measurements of the cosmic ray proton energy spectrum in the "knee'' region
- Precise Measurement of the Cosmic Ray Helium Spectrum above 0.1 PeV
- A Minimal Interpretation of the Galactic Cosmic-Ray Proton and Helium Spectra from GeV to PeV Energies
- Precise measurement of the cosmic-ray spectrum and $\left \langle \ln A \right \rangle$ by LHAASO -- connecting the Galactic to the extragalactic components
- LHAASO protons versus LHAASO diffuse gamma-rays: a consistency check
- High-energy Cosmic Ray production in X-ray Binary Jets
- Possible contribution of X-ray binary jets to the Galactic cosmic ray and neutrino flux
- Microquasar jet-cocoon systems as PeVatrons
- Microquasars as the major contributors to Galactic cosmic rays around the "knee"
- Microquasar Remnants as Pevatrons Illuminating the Galactic Cosmic Ray Knee
- Microquasar Cygnus X-3 as the PeVatron powering the Cygnus Bubble
- Implication of multiple source populations of Galactic cosmic rays from proton and helium spectra
- All-sky search for individual Primordial Black Hole bursts with LHAASO
- Search for the Hawking radiation of primordial black holes: prospective sensitivity of LHAASO
- Black Hole Metamorphosis and Stabilization by Memory Burden
- New Mass Window for Primordial Black Holes as Dark Matter from Memory Burden Effect
- High-energy gamma-ray emission from memory-burdened primordial black holes
- Probing Memory-Burdened Primordial Black Holes with Galactic Sources observed by LHAASO
- The fast, the slow and the merging: probes of evaporating memory burdened PBHs
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