Cold dark matter subhalos are expected to populate galaxies in numbers. If dark matter selfannihilates, these objects turn into prime targets for indirect searches, in particular with gamma-ray telescopes. Incidentally, the Fermi-LAT catalog already contains many unidentified sources that might be associated with subhalos. In this paper, we infer the statistics of those subhalos which could be identified as gamma-ray point-like sources from their predicted distribution properties. We use a semi-analytical model for the Galactic subhalo population, which, in contrast to cosmological simulations, can be made fully consistent with current kinematic constraints in the Milky Way and has no resolution limit. The model incorporates tidal stripping, predicted from a realistic distribution of baryons in the Milky Way. The same baryonic distribution contributes a diffuse gamma-ray foreground, which adds up to that, often neglected, induced by the smooth dark matter and the unresolved subhalos. This idealized configuration, as viewed by an idealized telescope à la Fermi-LAT, implies a correlation between point-like subhalo signals and diffuse background. Based on this modeling, we compute the full statistics semi-analytically, and accurately determine the distribution properties of the most luminous subhalos in the sky (relative to background). We find a number of visible subhalos of order O(0 − 1) for optimistic model parameters and a WIMP mass of 100 GeV, maximized for a cored host halo. This barely provides support to the current interpretation of several Fermi unidentified sources as subhalos. We also find that it is more likely to detect the smooth Galactic halo itself before subhalos, should dark matter in the GeV-TeV mass range self-annihilate through s-wave processes.

The cold dark matter (CDM) scenario predicts that galactic halos should host a huge amount of subhalos possibly as light as or lighter than planets, depending on the nature of dark matter.Predicting their abundance and distribution on such small scales has important implications for dark matter searches and searches for subhalos themselves, which could provide a decisive test of the CDM paradigm. A major difficulty in subhalo population model building is to account for the gravitational stripping induced by baryons, which strongly impact on the overall dynamics within the scale radii of galaxies. In this paper, we focus on these "baryonic" tides from analytical perspectives, summarizing previous work on galactic disk shocking, and thoroughly revisiting the impact of individual encounters with stars. For the latter, we go beyond the reference calculation of Gerhard and Fall (1983) to deal with penetrative encounters, and provide new analytical results. Based upon a full statistical analysis of subhalo energy change during multiple stellar encounters possibly occurring during disk crossing, we show how subhalos lighter than ∼ 1 M are very efficiently pruned by stellar encounters, and how that modifies their mass function in a stellar environment. If reasonably resilient, surviving subhalos have lost all their mass but the inner cusp, with a tidal mass function strongly departing from the cosmological one; otherwise, their number density can drop by an order of magnitude at the solar position in the Milky Way with respect to disk-shocking effects only. For illustration, we integrate these results into our analytical subhalo population model. They can easily be incorporated to any other analytical or numerical approach. This study complements those using cosmological simulations, which cannot resolve dark matter subhalos on such small scales.

As searches for thermal and self-annihilating dark matter (DM) intensify, it becomes crucial to include as many relevant physical processes and ingredients as possible to refine signal predictions, in particular those which directly relate to the intimate properties of DM. We investigate the combined impact of DM subhalos and the (velocity-dependent) Sommerfeld enhancement of the annihilation cross section, in both the s-and p-wave cases. Both features are expected to play an important role in searches for thermal DM particle candidates with masses around or beyond TeV, or in scenarios with a light dark sector. We provide a detailed analytical description of the phenomena at play, and show how they scale with the subhalo masses and the main Sommerfeld parameters. We derive approximate analytical expressions for the overall boost factors resulting from these combined effects, from which the intricate phenomenology can be better understood, and which strongly increase gamma-ray signal predictions for typical targets of different masses (from dwarf galaxies to galaxy clusters). DM subhalos lead to an increase of the Sommerfeld effect by several orders of magnitude (for both the s-and p-wave cases), especially on resonances, which makes them critical to get sensible predictions.

Gamma-ray observations have long been used to constrain the properties of dark matter (DM), with a strong focus on weakly interacting massive particles annihilating through velocity-independent processes. However, in the absence of clear-cut observational evidence for the simplest candidates, the interest of the community in more complex DM scenarios involving a velocity-dependent cross-section has been growing steadily over the past few years. We present the first systematic study of velocity-dependent DM annihilation (in particular p-wave annihilation and Sommerfeld enhancement) in a variety of astrophysical objects, not only including the well-studied Milky Way dwarf satellite galaxies, but nearby dwarf irregular galaxies and local galaxy clusters as well. Particular attention is given to the interplay between velocity dependence and DM halo substructure. Uncertainties related to halo mass, phase-space and substructure modelling are also discussed in this velocity-dependent context. We show that, for s-wave annihilation, extremely large subhalo boost factors are to be expected, up to 1011 in clusters and up to 106–107 in dwarf galaxies where subhalos are usually assumed not to play an important role. Boost factors for p-wave annihilation are smaller but can still reach 103 in clusters. The angular extension of the DM signal is also significantly impacted, with e.g. the cluster typical emission radius increasing by a factor of order 10 in the s-wave case. We also compute the signal contrast of the objects in our sample with respect to annihilation happening in the Milky Way halo. Overall, we find that the hierarchy between the brightest considered targets depends on the specific details of the assumed particle-physics model.

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