Dark matter constraints from box-shaped gamma-ray features

By A. Ibarra, Sergio L'opez Gehler, Miguel Pato. 2012

141 citations recorded by the source corpus.

The observation of a sharp spectral feature in the gamma-ray sky would be one of the cleanest ways to identify dark matter and pinpoint its properties. Over the years a lot of attention has been paid to two specific features, namely gamma-ray lines and internal bremsstrahlung. Here, we explore a third class of spectral signatures, box-shaped gamma-ray spectra, that naturally arise in dark matter cascade annihilations or decays into intermediate particles that in turn decay into photons. Using Fermi-LAT data, we derive constraints on the dark matter parameter space for both annihilating and decaying dark matter, and show explicitly that our limits are competitive to strategies employing standard spectral features. More importantly, we find robust limits even in the case of non-degenerate dark matter and intermediate particle masses. This result is particularly relevant in constraining dark matter frameworks with gamma-ray data. We conclude by illustrating the power of box-shaped gamma-ray constraints on concrete particle physics scenarios.

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics, Nuclear and High Energy Physics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/0f1e0c4d4a2171c4e4aa17b5bfcbe82d3c8dac9e

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In Astronomy and Astrophysics

1. Christoph Weniger
2. C. McCabe
3. I. Cholis
4. F. Calore
5. T. Bringmann
6. L. Rauch
7. T. Undagoitia

In Nuclear and High Energy Physics

1. Christoph Weniger
2. F. Calore
3. C. McCabe
4. T. Bringmann
5. I. Cholis
6. S. Profumo
7. F. Collaboration
8. J. Gaskins

Citations in the corpus

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• Optimized dark matter searches in deep observations of Segue 1 with MAGIC (2013, unknown): “(2) in [44]).”
• Lectures on Dark Matter Physics (2016, unknown): “, χχ→ φφ) that then decays to a photon pair (φ→ γγ) [88].”
• Gamma Ray Signals from Dark Matter: Concepts, Status and Prospects (2012, background): “tatistics (see e.g. [65]). 2.3. Cascade decays Another possibility to produce pronounced spectral features is DM annihilating into intermediate neutral states, χχ→ φφ, which then decay directly (φ→ γγ[66]) or via FSR (e.g. φ→ ℓ+ℓ−γ[67]) into photons. While the latter situation results in a spectrum ”