Cosmic Rays and Dark Matter Detection

Dear Colleagues,

Cosmic rays (CRs) were discovered by Victor Franz Hess, when he observed ionizing radiation in the atmosphere increased with altitude in 1911 and 1913. After one century of rapid developments, mankind enters a new era of cosmic ray detection with ground-based and space-based particle detectors. Ground-based experiments, such as ARGO-YBJ, HESS, HAWC, CTA, MAGIC, Tibet AS-gamma, LHAASO and ICE-CUBE, detect the particle shower, created by the interaction of the primary CR with the earth atmosphere, either directly or in an indirect way through the Cerenkov imaging technique. On the other hand, direct measurements are carried out by balloon or space detectors, such as ATIC, BESS, CAPRICE/WiZard, CREAM, Fermi-LAT, MASS, HEAT, PAMELA, AMS-02, CALET and DAMPE. Those measurements are based on the CR direct interactions with detectors. The advantages of ground-based experiments are their large acceptance and higher energy range, while space-based experiments show higher precision in measuring the energy scale and can identify the CR species.

Dark matter (DM) was discovered by Fritz Zwicky and others by studying clusters of galaxies in 1933. After one century of study, we still know little about DM. Other evidence of DM, including CMB observations and the effect of gravitational lensing, exists. There are some candidates for DM, e.g., weakly interacting massive particles (WIMPs), axion-like particles (ALPs), primordial black holes, etc. For WIMPs and ALPs, detections are carried out in three complementary ways, i.e., dark matter production, direct detection with underground instruments and indirect detection in CRs.

DM annihilation or decay may produce extra-elementary CRs, including neutral particles (photons and neutrinos) and charged ones (positrons and antiprotons). Thus, CR is an important way to understand DM.

In this Special Issue, we will collect original work and review articles, related to the experiments and theories on CRs and DM, including instrumentation, advances in data analysis and beyond the standard model theories.

We look forward to receiving your valuable contributions.

Dr. Jie Feng
Prof. Fernando Barão
Dr. Sami Caroff
Guest Editors

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• cosmic ray
• dark matter
• photons
• neutrino
• axion
• black hole
• WIMP
• astroparticle
• solar modulation
• Cerenkov detectors