Dark Matter and Pulsar Origins of the Rising Cosmic Ray Positron Fraction in Light of New Data From AMS
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The rise of the cosmic ray positron fraction with energy, as first observed with high confidence by PAMELA, implies that a large flux of high energy positrons has been recently (or is being currently) injected into the local volume of the Milky Way. With the new and much more precise measurement of the positron fraction recently provided by AMS, we revisit the question of the origin of these high energy positrons. We find that while some dark matter models (annihilating directly to electrons or muons) no longer appear to be capable of accommodating these data, other models in which ∼1-3 TeV dark matter particles annihilate to unstable intermediate states could still be responsible for the observed signal. Nearby pulsars also remain capable of explaining the observed positron fraction. Future measurements of the positron fraction by AMS (using a larger data set), combined with their anticipated measurements of various cosmic ray secondary-to-primary ratios, may enable us to further discriminate between these remaining scenarios.
Subfields: Nuclear and High Energy Physics
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/2145019762956f9e4f2218353502c288eb71f93d
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In Nuclear and High Energy Physics
Citations in the corpus
- Interpretation of AMS-02 electrons and positrons data (2014, background): “In this case, we will obtain that the prominent role of Geminga is reduced (its efficiency can now be smaller than in the previous case) but the additional “backgound” pulsars are constrained to possess relatively small efficiencies.”
- Background model systematics for the Fermi GeV excess (2014, background): “The same applies for the large scale (angular and spatial) gamma-ray spectra [58, 94, 95], which, in turn, impact any indirect DM search, either in antiprotons [96–98], positrons [99] or gamma-rays [100].”