Abstract
Antideuteron cosmic rays constitute a promising channel for indirect detection of dark matter, and experimental data sensitive to prospective dark matter signals can be expected in the near future. The antideuteron channel has a substantial uncertainty component originating from the theoretical description of antideuteron formation. We here investigate the uncertainty contributions from Monte Carlo hadronization modeling, and explore the prospects of tuning Monte Carlo event generators specifically for antideuteron formation. We further calculate the antideuteron spectra from gravitino decays in supersymmetric models with trilinear R-parity violation (RPV), and estimate the limits on the RPV couplings that can be set by near future experimental data. As an alternative to the established coalescence model of antideuteron formation, we introduce an alternative model based on experimentally measured antideuteron formation cross sections. We find this model to give a more consistent description of experimental antideuteron data, giving a significantly better description of recent data from the ALICE experiment, which the coalescence model fails to reproduce.
Many well motivated dark matter models originate from models of new physics with large numbers of free parameters, whose phenomenology can vary drastically across their parameter spaces. In order to identify the model that is in best agreement with current experiments, global fits, taking all relevant data into account, are necessary. A significant part of the work behind this thesis has been contributions to the development of the GAMBIT fitting code; the most significant contribution being the development of a Monte Carlo cascade decay code that will allow cosmic ray data to be included in the fits.