MeV astronomy with Herwig?

Abstract

GeV-scale dark matter is an increasingly attractive target for direct detection, indirect detection, and collider searches. Especially for masses in the MeV to GeV range, indirect detection is expected to give a leading constraint. In that range, dark matter annihilations into hadronic final states produce a challenging zoo of light hadronic resonances. With an update of Herwig7, we provide a modeling of these processes and study energy spectra from annihilation through a vector mediator. We cover dark matter masses between 250 MeV and 5 GeV and include an error estimate. This opens up new opportunities for fully studying indirect detection signals for hidden dark matter sectors with vector mediators in the sub-GeV range.