Perspective of monochromatic gamma-ray line detection with the High Energy cosmic-Radiation Detection (HERD) facility onboard China's Space Station

Abstract

HERD is the High Energy cosmic-Radiation Detection instrument proposed to operate onboard China's space station in the 2020s. It is designed to detect energetic cosmic ray nuclei, leptons and photons with a high energy resolution ($\sim 1\%$ for electrons and photons and $20\%$ for nuclei) and a large geometry factor ($>3m^{2}sr$ for electrons and diffuse photons and $>2m^{2}sr$ for nuclei). In this work we discuss the capability of HERD to detect monochromatic $\gamma$-ray lines, based on simulations of the detector performance. It is shown that HERD will be one of the most sensitive instruments for monochromatic $\gamma$-ray searches at energies between $\sim 10$ to a few hundred GeV. Above hundreds of GeV, Cherenkov telescopes will be more sensitive due to their large effective area. As a specific example, we show that a good portion of the parameter space of a supersymmetric dark matter model can be probed with HERD.

Comments: 9 pages, 7 figures, matches version published in Astropart.Phys