
Strongly Coupled Dark Matter Models Can Produce Antihelium 4
AMS-02 has tentatively detected a flux of antihelium nuclei (around 10 events in total). This observation, if confirmed, would be very exciting because antihelium is not supposed to be produced by standard astrophysics -- and would point towards new physics. More confusingly, a handful of these events may be consistent with antihelium 4 -- which is difficult to produce even in dark matter models. We propose the first realistic dark matter model capable of producing an observable antihelium 4 flux. If the WIMP is very heavy (near unitarity scale), and annihilates through a strongly coupled dark sector, then each annihilation will produce a shower of dark pions with very high multiplicity. If these particles quickly decay to standard model quarks through a portal interaction -- the result is a high multiplicity of baryons produced promptly at the same vertex. This significantly enhances the formation of heavy antinuclei, and makes observations of antihelium-4 possible.
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