Search for gamma-ray spectral lines with the Fermi Large Area Telescope and dark matter implications
By F. Collaboration. 2013
261 citations recorded by the source corpus.
Weakly interacting massive particles (WIMPs) are a theoretical class of particles that are excellent dark matter candidates. WIMP annihilation or decay may produce essentially monochromatic γ rays detectable by the Fermi Large Area Telescope (LAT) against the astrophysical γ-ray emission of the Galaxy. We have searched for spectral lines in the energy range 5–300 GeV using 3.7 years of data, reprocessed with updated instrument calibrations and an improved energy dispersion model compared to the previous Fermi-LAT Collaboration line searches. We searched in five regions selected to optimize sensitivity to different theoretically motivated dark matter density distributions. We did not find any globally significant lines in our a priori search regions and present 95% confidence limits for annihilation cross sections of self-conjugate WIMPs and decay lifetimes. Our most significant fit occurred at 133 GeV in our smallest search region and had a local significance of 3.3 standard deviations, which translates to a global significance of 1.5 standard deviations. We discuss potential systematic effects in this search, and examine the feature at 133 GeV in detail. We find that the use both of reprocessed data and of additional information in the energy dispersion model contributes to the reduction in significance of the linelike feature near 130 GeV relative to significances reported in other works. We also find that the feature is narrower than the LAT energy resolution at the level of 2 to 3 standard deviations, which somewhat disfavors the interpretation of the 133 GeV feature as a real WIMP signal.
Subfields: Nuclear and High Energy Physics
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/086d5223a6bc6ea95af5a7e4d7711e5a10c7a0ff
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In Nuclear and High Energy Physics
Citations in the corpus
- The dark Z′ portal: direct, indirect and collider searches (2013, background): “The Fermi-LAT Collaboration, though, has claimed no evidence for such a line [97].”
- Sensitivity projections for dark matter searches with the Fermi large area telescope (2016, background): “, the background weighted by how strongly it overlaps with the signal) for the search [58, 138, 139].”
- Optimized dark matter searches in deep observations of Segue 1 with MAGIC (2013, methodology): “Searches for features of such origin have been conducted by the Fermi -LAT, in 2 years of observations of the GC region [66], setting lower limits on τχ of few×10 29 s up to mχ ∼ 600 GeV, whereas, as explained in section 6.2.1, H.E.S.S. observations on the GC Halo are not sensitive for decaying DM s”