Some dark matter models predict that dark matter particles may have masses of 100 TeV or more.
If these dark matter particles have a finite lifetime, they would release high-energy photons with energies above 10 TeV while decaying into Standard Model particles.
To find evidence of such heavy dark matter particles, researchers at the High Altitude Cosmic Ray Observatory (LHAASO) analyzed data collected over 570 days by the detector’s Square Kilometer Array (KM2A).
Theoretically, the dark matter density is higher near the silver core, and the researchers focused on analyzing high-energy photons in five regions near the silver core.
If such high-energy photons can be produced when dark matter decays, then the measurements should be different in different regions.
But LHAASO did not measure such a difference, so the researchers concluded that these heavier dark matter particles have lifetimes of at least 10 trillion billion years or more.
A related paper was published in Physical Review Letters.
