Difficulty of Detecting Minihalos Via Gamma Rays from Dark Matter Annihilation

Analytical calculations and recent numerical experiments have shown that a sizable amount of the mass of our Galaxy is in a form of clumpy, virialized substructures that, according to Diemand et al., can be as light as 10(-6)M(.). In this work we estimate the gamma-ray flux expected from dark matter annihilation occurring within these minihalos, under the hypothesis that the bulk of dark matter is composed by neutralinos. We generate mock sky maps showing the angular distribution of the expected gamma-ray signal. We compare them with the sensitivities of satellite-borne experiments such as GLAST and find that a possible detection of minihalos is indeed very challenging.