Potential of the Large Observatory for X-ray Timing telescope for the search for dark matter
Large observatory for x-ray timing (LOFT) is a concept of a next-generation x-ray telescope considered in the context of the "Cosmic Vision" program of the European Space Agency. The Large Area Detector on board of LOFT will be a collimator-type telescope with an unprecedentedly large collecting area of about 10(5) cm(2) in the energy band between 2 and 100 keV. We demonstrate that LOFT will be a powerful dark matter detector, suitable for the search of the x-ray line emission expected from decays of light dark matter particles in galactic halos. We show that LOFT will have sensitivity for dark matter line search more than an order of magnitude higher than that of all existing x-ray telescopes. In this way, LOFT will be able to provide a new insight into the fundamental problem of the nature of dark matter.