Probing Ultra-Heavy Dark Matter Signatures through VERITAS

Traditional dark matter searches focus on diffuse electromagnetic signals across a broad frequency range, often overlooking diversity in the time domain. Recent cosmological proposals suggest that dark matter signatures may also emerge as rare, ultra-short transient events. One such model involves a type of ultra-heavy dark matter (UHDM) whose decay could produce an intense, microsecond-scale gamma-ray burst, generating anywhere from tens to millions of overlapping air showers in the upper atmosphere.

These showers' secondary cascades emit Cherenkov light detectable by imaging atmospheric Cherenkov telescopes (IACTs), such as the VERITAS Gamma Ray Observatory. At sufficient multiplicity, the resulting signal forms a dense, approximately circular wavefront in the telescope camera, resistant to parallax due to the superposition of near countless Cherenkov photon distributions.

This project simulates and processes UHDM-sourced wavefronts under varying conditions of energy, shower radius, incident angle, and photon density using gamma/cosmic ray analysis tools such as COsmic Ray SImulations for KAscade (CORSIKA), Gamma-Ray Optics (GrOptics), Camera and Readout (CARE), and VERITAS Gamma-ray Analysis Suite (VEGAS). Hillas parameters and other morphological features are extracted from the resulting images to characterize shared qualities and develop candidate selection criteria.

Current work involves collecting the aforementioned attributes and defining quality cuts, which are to be applied to archival VERITAS data in search of potential UHDM events. The tools and methods developed here contribute to expanding dark matter searches into the time domain, offering new pathways for detecting signatures beyond the reach of traditional frameworks.