New signature of dark matter annihilations : Gamma rays from intermediate-mass black holes

By G. Bertone, A. Zentner, J. Silk. 2005

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We study the prospects for detecting gamma rays from dark matter (DM) annihilations in enhancements of the DM density (mini-spikes) around intermediate-mass black holes (IMBH) with masses in the range 10{sup 2} < or approx. M/M{sub {center_dot}} < or approx. 10{sup 6}. Focusing on two different IMBH formation scenarios, we show that, for typical values of mass and cross section of common DM candidates, mini-spikes, produced by the adiabatic growth of DM around pregalactic IMBHs, would be bright sources of gamma rays, which could be easily detected with large field-of-view gamma-ray experiments such as GLAST, and further studied with smaller field-of-view, larger-area experiments like Air Cherenkov Telescopes CANGAROO, HESS, MAGIC, and VERITAS. The detection of many gamma-ray sources not associated with a luminous component of the Local Group, and with identical cutoffs in their energy spectra at the mass of the DM particle, would provide a potential smoking-gun signature of DM annihilations and shed new light on the nature of intermediate and supermassive black holes.

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics, Nuclear and High Energy Physics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/1ddbe447d95e8542391802d7178c10bcda31c376

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Citations in the corpus

The Dark Matter Annihilation Signal from Galactic Substructure: Predictions for GLAST (2008, methodology): “…the DM is a weakly interacting massive particle (WIMP), such as the neutralino in supersymmetric extensions of the standard model or Kaluza-Klein excitations of standard model fields in models with universal extra dimensions (for a recent review of particle DM theories, see Bertone et al. 2005a).”
History of dark matter (2018, unknown): “…been proposed, including Galactic dark matter subhalos not associated with dwarf galaxies (Diemand, Kuhlen, and Madau, 2007; Pieri, Bertone, and Branchini, 2008), and density “spikes” of dark matter around black holes (Gondolo and Silk, 1999; Bertone, Zentner, and Silk, 2005; Zhao and Silk, 2005).”